Date: Sun, 09 Feb 2003 18:53:57 +0000 From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk> Subject: Re: the latest in propaganda... Geoff/All The coming community - was originally published in 1990. This text was written then in one of the high points of the counter-reformation, at the moment when globalisation was being named for the first time as something that would triumphantly change the world. Let me quote exstensively one of the most telling moments in the text...he is writing on Debord who appears to be extremely central to Agamben's work "...Today in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord ? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give to the process that today dominates world history) was directed not only towards the expropriation of roductive activity, but also and principally toward the aleination of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of the logos which one of Heraclitus's fragments oidentified as the common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it..." (P80) As long as you do not confuse the 'spectacle' with a false notion of the dominance of the image, but rather understand it as an economic and social relation "Capitalism in its final form" then it seems that the very text you quote below contains a different answer to the question you ask. Especially given the difficulties that the spectacle finds itself in 13 years on... regards steve gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu wrote: >Eric, you mention the Zapatistas and "another world," and that reminds me of >Agamben's call towards the Coming Community. > >He writes in a book by the same name: > >It is the Most Common taht cuts off any real community. Hence the impotent >omnivalence of whatever being. It is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor >resignation. These pure singluraties communicate only in the empty space >of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. >They are expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, >the sign E. Tricksters or fakes, assistants or 'toons, they are the exemplars >of the coming community (10-10.1). > >Is there any choice? > >Geof > > > >
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