Here’s a a computer generated simulation of the process of construction:

Obviously, the idea is being sold on the basis of a humanitarian imperative, as indicated through the initial video I watched on the Singularity University site. Natural disasters and urban sprawl means that over a billion people live in dwellings with little or no resources such as running water and electricity. Most of these are not built to a sufficient quality to resist storms, earthquakes and other such dangers that could be detrimental to safety. By building houses in one day with minimal labour and waste, many more people can be house before and after a disaster has occurred.

However, I’m sure that the incentive for developing such building technologies go beyond their altruistic applications towards more profitable applications. For instance, even though the construction industry is known for it’s employment of immigrant labour to keep costs to a minimum, exploitative practises are rife (see this article HERE for a case study of Dubai’s skyscrapers built with the sweat of cheap labourers). If contour crafting and it’s other sister technologies develop to the stage of industry wide take up, it will mean a massive de-skilling of labour from the activities of construction, but a re-skilling of labour away from the craft of building towards the maintenance of the building machines and the maintenance of the reserves needed for assemblage. However, the ratio of re-skilled to de-skilled will be dramatically unbalanced, where the number of re-skilled has shrunk and where a division of labour can be applied at the level of re-skilling to eliminate the need for over-skilled labourers. The prospect of automation reaching the construction industry is both exciting and bleak, yet this relation to dwelling, building and labour needs to thought through.

I was going to write some more but must get some sleep. I’ll be away in London in the next few days for Marxism 2010, so I’ll just say I intend to write a bit about automation, de-skilling and ‘dwelling’ (gotta throw in a bit of Heidegger here and there) when I get back next week.

The above picture is a scan from the news magazine The Week (issue 772). I thought the juxtaposition was quite upsetting, so I decided it needed to be shared. Here are two excellent examples of the inequalities inherent in our systems of wealth distribution: one story shows the obscene wealth and decadence of the American rich and the other shows the poverty and suffering of one of the world poorest nations. This has to stop.

I recently finished an excellent little book from Zero books called The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour. A large part of the text was taken up by discussions of the term ‘meritocracy’ and its appropriation by the left and right. It is used as a progressive term to signify that “one should rise or fall by one’s own merits” in a society of equal opportunity. Thus any individual’s own effort and natural genius morally justifies their own financial successes: Everyone is equal in opportunity but unequal in character. Seymour goes on to discuss the research of Stephen Aldridge of the Cabinet Office’s Performance and Innovation Unit, who presented his work to the Blairite ‘third way’ sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens.

He said that to have a ‘strong’ version of meritocracy, it would be necessary to raise taxes on income and investments, and abolish inheritance. For social mobility to realistically take place, it had to be possible to move down as well as up the scale, and thus it would be necessary to “reduce barriers to downward social mobility for dull middle class children”. The Government distanced itself from these findings – this was not the meritocracy that had in mind. (p.55)

To follow the logic of meritocracy one would need to increment a dissolution of inheritance, otherwise the premise of ‘equality’ in a meritocracy is false. The hypocrisy of meritocracy is clear for all to see, and I agree with Seymour that it is a “collective insult on humankind”. If a supposedly socialist party such as Labour is unwilling to introduce such measures and the conservatives are about as likely to drop inheritance as throw eggs at the Queen, then why is dropping inheritance a faux pas, even when it coincides with the logic of our contemporary [fascistic] form of neoliberalism?

In The Communist Manifesto Marx lists the “abolition of all right of inheritance” third in a list of 10 procedures to be enacted once state power has been claimed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the expropriators are expropriated. Inheritance is very important as a consequence of the destruction of capitalism, but as Marx noted in The Right of Inheritance eliminating inheritance tout court would not rid society of the structures of private property and therefore may not be a progressive move towards communism at all: the relations of society are still essentially the same. “Inheritance does not create that power of transferring the produce of one man’s labor into another man’s pocket — it only relates to the change in individuals who yield that power” (Marx). To use the bourgeois powers to eliminate inheritance would seemingly be impossible, given that one major point of inheritance is for one’s children to be protected from hardships after the death of a dependent. The incentive for wealth accumulation and the provision of family assets such as homes and savings would be limited if inheritance was abolished. Although it would ultimately take one avenue of social mobility away from the rich, the basic capitalist desire would still be based on individual self-interest, personal wealth accumulation and appropriation of others labour as a means of financial success.

To proclaim the abolition of the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social revolution would only tend to lead the working class away from the true point of attack against present society. It would be as absurd a thing as to abolish the laws of contract between buyer and seller, while continuing to present state of exchange of commodities. (Marx)

Even if inheritance was abolished, it would only encourage capital flight and devious loopholes to ensure assets end up in the ‘right’ pockets. To abolish inheritance is not a solution to redistributing wealth, but it shows how the logic of accumulation is bound to the family as a centre for protection and privilege. This helps to maintain structures of class inequality and social immobility within a meritocracy.

However, even though inheritance is an effect not the cause of inequality, if there was a referendum on the issue, I know how I would vote, although, as “Professional white owner-occupiers are most likely to receive an inheritance” I’m not sure this lot would agree:

Agamben sketches out a history of metaphysics according to the anthropological machine. This is the history of humanism defined as politics. Heidegger is seen as the last thinker of humanism (as Dasein is the possessor of superior essence) yet is also the great renouncer of humanism: as the ‘human’ doesn’t reach the real essence of humanity which is separated from animals by an abyss. Agamben’s notion of ‘the open’ is that which is a reconciliation of the human with its animality via an ‘attitude’ that opens the condition of salvation. This messianic moment of salvation is the post-historical end of the anthropological machine that produces exclusively human history.

The homo sapien was defines as that whose task was the Socratic imperative to ‘know thyself. Vico challenged this to say that man is the being who must invent himself in the mode of autopoiesis. Man has indefinite form and so cannot ever know himself. There is a link here between post-humanism and negative theology, as man is made in the image off God and as God is unfathomable so man must be also. The future of man and techne are thus open and not fixed with any destiny. What is certain, however, is that we have seen the animalization of man (by the Nazi’s to the Jews and the comatose who can be killed, sustained by a biopolitics of bare-life he calls zoe) and the difference needs to be explored fully.

Agamben deconstructs Heidegger’s reading of Jacob Von Uexkull’s biological writings on the ‘umwelt’ (life-world) of animals, first by reviewing Heidegger’s tripartite separation of the essences of beings as those who are world poor, world-less and with world: where the human has a life-world the animal doesn’t. For Uexkull, all animals have a life-world but there is no world of worlds – each world coverages with the next but not absolutely, they remain at their own specific differentiated level and can never know the mode of access to the world of other animals. Heidegger sees only Dasein as having a world.

Animals have a fixed being towards something. they do not see the thing as such in its being nor do they see the nothing. They do have a perceived horizon which is open but not openable to other possibilities. Heidegger equates this state to one of profound boredom, where there are no possibilities. Heidegger notes that Dasein also experiences profound boredom (or ontological boredom – bored with being as a totality, rather than with beings, which would be ontic boredom). In this profound boredom, Dasein’s world trembles, as all significance is lost and meaning slips away. What is revealed in this profound boredom, when Dasein has all her possibilities stripped away, is the originary mode of Dasein’s being-in-the-world of possibilities. When these possibilities are not there, one recognises that most of the time one has possibilities to be otherwise. Animals cannot experience anything other than what is possible to it and therefore, can never be bored. The animal is continually captivated by the world in this state of non-possibility and profound boredom.

Agamben says that Heidegger misses the main revelation in his thesis. . . that the animal and Dasein share a zone of continuity – the zone of profound boredom itself. The animal is the deep structure of Dasein’s own life-world. The important distinction now is that not only does Dasein get reduced to the animality of zoe, but animals themselves are reduced to zoe by the opaque logic of the slaughter house. Agamben doesn’t look at the question of animal ethics, but only examines the result of this reduction to bare-life within the world of political Dasein (where he sees things like the genome project, economic and human rights reducing Dasein to a humanist essence cloaked in ideology, what Agamben calls ‘bios’, the political life of man, which proves vacuous and contingent to the whims of the sovereign).

Agamben argues that this shared zoe is the open as alethia, where the reconciliation of man with is animality is possible. Agamben looks to the gnostic Marcion who condemns nature and thus man’s redemption comes from transcending it, whereas for Benjamin, nature is outside salvation and in no need of it – it is outside of history and destiny. This is the saved night or beatitudo, where there is no man or nature but simply the between as a zone of indifference where the anthropological machine is out out of play.

Beatitudo is the transvaluation and redemption of that which couldn’t be saved but given back to itself, a letting be of nature outside being. This is the messianic banquet of the Hebraic bible, where nature will be itself without the anthropological strife. Nature is redeemed to a state of non-saved, it is saved less. It is dismantling of the machine that create the state of exception, a redemption from not needing to be redeemed.

Caputo looks to the story of Adam and Eve and the fall to see that there was no fall at all, only the plane of immanence of their redemption. This  Deleuzian point is that the world doesn’t need redemption as the transcendence of the world is the world. The community to come is not a community of the same essence but a belonging together of existents in a community of identity of singular essences: it is a politics of love that doesn’t subjugate humans to history but letting beings be in their own self creation (autopoeisis).

Agamben says that those of this community are the blessed. They each have a halo, a crown of glory, that grows with intensity the closer it is brought  to perfection. There are three different glows but they can blend together. But the state cannot deal with these intensities, these ‘what evers’ (as any being of any essence) because of their peaceful being in common. the state reacts to these with violence, such as was seen at Tienanmen Square. Human rights are based upon a stratified essence of man and thus are vacuous as these essences can be denied, lost or abandoned. the rights of the existents within the community of love cannot be lost as their rights are connected to their essence as ‘what ever’ they are.

[side note by Caputo:  without grace there is no sense of love, loss or punishment. That is why unbaptized babies to to limbo as they have no grace to allow their joining with God]

It is not how the world is but that it is, which is the mystical: here Wittgenstein echoes Heidegger (who he had apparently read). Transcendence is not beyond the world but is the plane of immanence. God means the chora taking place to and in the world.For Deleuze, immanence and transcendence are suspended as separate in becoming which is immanent in it’s transcendence and transcendent in it’s immanence. The statement ‘The good is that each thing is as it is’ leads to the death of God theology, as God is made flesh in and of the world. This is a revaluation not of the sacred but of the profane. The world is profane as God; the glorious body is the  mortal body. ‘Amor fati’ is the infinite love of things as they are, where things could not have been otherwise, therefore they are a necessity as treated as such. Or is it that beings express a preference to be rather than not, and so is not a necessity but a preference?

Sartre’s  essay The Transcendence of the ego explained that it was not the transcendental where the ego of the subject was formed. the ego is the constituted aspect of a pre-reflexive consciousness. The ego is what is actualized (to use Deleuzian terminology). For Merleau-Pionty, it is the flesh that is actualized. Yet for Deleuze, there is no subject or object at all on the annoyances plane of immanence where everything gets constituted, Immanence is a process of becoming without predicates. The plane of immanence is the life between the potential and the virtual (the part of life is not the man as actuality – the example Caputo uses is of the Rogue from a Dickens book who lays half dead on the ground surrounded by people who hate him, yet in this moment close to death they have empathy for his as something at all, something not actualized into the wretched man but between the potential and the virtual, he has the chance to be reborn. This place  of un-actualized becoming is zoe, the bare-life that isn’t political but impersonal, like the life of infants who have no ego, where the plane of immanence rushes through them. this is zoe as joy not as biopower, where life is not constituted into ego’s but to singular essences.

[Casua sui means without an external cause is the plane of immanence whose being is form by the its own momentum of subject and object. This plane of immanence is the connatus of life, the striving for life and the rejoicing in being. This is bliss, the blessed life, joy that a thing takes in its own life - the struggling to exist for life as life something unconceptualized and unwritten and unprediacted).]

Flesh doesn’t need to be for common phenomenological experience, for Deleuze and Agamben but it does for Merleau-Pionty, to remain locked with the field of consciousness. The Dickensian Rogue is “a flabby lump of mortality” who is not only a living flesh of intensities but the alive of de-subjectivized flesh of ecstasy, torture or ‘instasis’ (internal ecstasy). A corpse is the cessation of the flesh. For Deleuze, the body without flesh is the higher intellectual plateaux, whereas the flesh without body is the dying unconscious man.

Flesh is the ur-ethical, as it is life between the actual and the potential. There is a vulnerability to the flesh, a primordial exposure. Flesh is holy: the primal scene of Christianity is Jesus on the cross, yet the resurrection is not the resurrection of his body but the resurrection of the life of moral beings to become again and again. To be reborn one needs to be exposed to the plane of immanence (as they are over actualized egos that need deterritorialization and re-subjectification). Life in continually punctuated with reinventions, where there is joy in being ones own cause.

Now come, fire!: The sun is blasting through onto my desk today and it’s reminded me of old Heraclitus. Here’s a quick quote from Fink in regards to the Heraclitian notion of Helios:

The times of the day and seasons apparently stand in connection with fire, a fire that does not, like lightening, suddenly tear open and place everything in the stamp of the outline, but that holds out like the heavenly fire, and in the duration, travels through the hours of the day and the times of the season… The heavenly fire brings forth growth. It nourishes growth and maintain it. The light-fire of Ηλιοζ [helios : the sun] tears open – different from lightning – continually; it opens the brightness of day in which it allows growth and allows time to each thing. This sun-fire, the heaven – illuminating power of Ηλιοζ, does not tarry fixed at one single place, but travels along the vault of heaven; and in this passage on the vault of heaven the sun-fire is light – and life-appropriating and time measuring. The metric of the sun’s course mentioned here lies before every calculative metric made by humans. We must think radiant Zeus together with Ηλιοζ as the power of the day which illuminates the entity of τα παντα [ta panta: the many].

(from Heidegger and Fink’s seminar on Heraclitus, p.37 and 39)

HERE is a link to the film of Society of the Spectacle, fully available on youtube. And HERE’s a link to the writings of all Situationist International thinkers available, in full, on-line.

The Spectacle and the commodity

Th Spectacle is a social relation of false consciousness mediated by images. It is an objective material relation resulting from the dominant mode of production, yet it is real only in its unreality. For the citizens of this society all is not well: once was the case that fulfilment came through having but now it is through the appearance of having. What one has is commodities and commodities are what is possible. The Spectacle reinforces what is possible against that which is impossible.

The Spectacle separates the worker from the product through the division of labour and its abstraction. The worker only deals with a fragment of a completed thing and thus becomes detached from the commodity itself. The Spectacle is a machine for the proletarianization of the whole world, as everyone is alienated from the commodities produced, as all commodities are mediated by a relation to the universal abstraction of capital. The universalization of abstraction turns it into the concrete. This abstract concreteness is the possible dictated by the commodity and provides the vision of the society of the Spectacle (it is a process known as ‘real abstraction’). The real condition of the citizens of the society of the Spectacle is one of concrete alienation,  unhomeliness and detachment from the collective (as collectivity is managed under the strained conditions of capitalist efficiency and anxiety).

Capital is not a real relation but an abstraction and thus an image. Capital accumulates as images and these images become the followed figures and substance of the Spectacle. The citizen of the Spectacle is the consumer of Spectacle and is respected by the capitalist for being a consumer. Yet the citizen is also exploited by the capitalist and consumes to ease her anxiety from the exploitation. This paradox is the figure (respected) against the ground (exploited) relation that lights up the spectacle day after day.

The citizen consumes to survive, Therefore, a survival principle based around the fear of scarcity propels consumption and production. This ensures the all important creation of surplus value. The principle of the Spectacle is one of ‘never enough’. The result is a massive excess of unnecessary commodification in the name of protecting the society of the Spectacle from the horrors of scarcity. Production and consumption equals capital and capital is the universal abstraction of the Spectacle. The Spectacle is the capability of the society as a whole (as the total abstraction of the possible). Capital = image =  Spectacle = money as universal equivalent = the possible.

The Spectacle is diffused by commodity abundance, where each commodity separates itself out as something special, yet it justifies the whole of the Spectacle. However, access to commodities is always fragmented by access to the universal equivalent of the money form. The Spectacle is the image that you want but can never fully posses. Each commodity strives for its own survival in the Spectacle through its separation from other commodities as a novelty and need, where its contingent creation becomes retroactively constituted as a necessity. This ‘cunning of the commodity’ always fails in the end, but the commodity is part of a process of general commodification which continues towards its Absolutization.

The commodity acts as a religious fetish and produces habitual submission by the citizen to the Spectacle. Commodity abundance overpowers organic development of social needs with an unlimited artificiality of desires. The power of the commodity, as a fetish, dominates our living desires and falsifies all social life. Just as capitalism has disenchanted the world, fetishized objects become disenchanted by their built in obsolescence and fluctuating  status. Prestigious objects become mudanized by the Spectacle as soon as they are taken home, where each new perfect product is superseded by a yet newer more perfect product the next day (the lie that sold the product is revealed).

There is a quality in quantity, that is the principle of the super abundance of the Spectacle. Abundance contains the ideology of choice, where the unlimited range of alternatives and varieties is the Spectacular freedom of the citizen of the Spectacle. This pseudo freedom of the citizen and their right to choose is the form of freedom of capitalist society that locks the citizen into world of the possible, of real abstraction and punctuated banalization.

The Spectacle and social production

The Spectacle is dogmatic but fluid. As Marx said “all that is solid melts into air” except, that is, for capitalism. The fluidity of values and commodities, as the possible, is produced by the abstraction of societies power and results in the citizens concrete lack of freedom. The Spectacle can also be in the name of communism, as Stalinism was Spectacle, as it did not change the world but used police state methods to transform peoples perceptions of the world. Ideology becomes an end in itself: the insane lie that obliterates reality is also a Spectacle. Stalinist bureaucracy was a Spectacle that we see today in our downsized and audited public and private institutions (see Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher). Just as the Spectacle of bureaucracy is everywhere and at all times, it is also invisible and given other names to hide its own Spectacular excess.

The global division of labour divides the world into spectacular tasks. These tasks are a concetization of a process of abstract labour. Thus the worker becomes alienated from their own labour capabilities into fix and monotonous tasks (whether teacher, banker, lawyer, or metal worker). Labour is turned from am meaningful task of exerting ones productive capabilities to one of banalization and pseudo gratification (‘yeah, one more sale!!’).

The family is the mechanism for the transference of class power. The family perpetuates models of social activity that becomes clichéd and prescribed social roles, even to the extent of becoming the rebellious and disenfranchised youth, who is splashed across the newspaper pages and commodified through films, music and art. Spectacular Rebelliousness is the flip side of of the same coin to Spectacular conformity, where the celebrity Stars promote their brand of idealized living (power, adventure, leisure, vacations, sexual promiscuity, sexual attractiveness and so on) to the lower classes that dream of becoming bourgeoisie in their image.

The Spectacle conceals the antagonistic ground of class struggle and exploitation. It does this through the visible figures of racism, and xenophobia, sport and elections, which stir archaic oppositions around nationalistic and territorial aggressions which don’t aim to change anything but gain a moment of highly intensive social affection without any structural change (as these sites of affective intensity are sites produced through the Spectacle itself). The real contradictions are repressed for the sake of the pleasure and entertainment of the Spectacle.

The Spectacle and revolutionary time

The problem with theories of the revolutionary subject is that they have separated thought from act. Unitary historical thought should in no way be distinct from the practical attitude to be adopted. It is the case that technical questions of organization are also social questions. The lack of thought concerning questions of organization is a lack of thought for the historical process as a whole (which is, as Lukacs said of Lenin, the thinking of genius).

There must be undertaken an internal critique of society: a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated social life is essential to understand the Spectacle. To do this, revolutionary theory must be put into practice. “Workers become dialecticians and put their thought into practice” (p,89). Revolutionary thought is not revolutionary by itself and must become a weapon. A revolutionary in action is a combatant, combatants are weapons in the struggle to make visible that which has always been the essential, but invisible ground of society. The revolutionary must think the historical ground of time that is suppressed by capitalism’s irreversible time.

History is the invisible ground of society and becomes temporalized by humanity. The world is governed by the Spectacle of time as irreversible time: the time of production and of commodities. This general time of society is the globally unified time that keeps the factory working ‘just in time’ day after day. This cut up identical world time is the time of production. It is a unified abstraction that operates and maintains the markets and maintains the possible Spectacle.

Perceptions of time change with the historical developments of civilizations. Time’s perception moves from the pure present to the negation of the passing of time through a mythological circular time. Circular time was part of the nomadic consciousness, as they encountered the periodic return of similar places. The settled society saw the repetition of activities and measured eternity by the passing of the day and the turning of the seasons framed through myths that guarantee the cosmic order of along the order established by the society. Circular mythical time was used by the rulers to make history their own private property, veiling the people to their place in in history’s events.

Time was appropriated through new modes of production where new class division meant the selling and capturing of time to create temporal surplus value: the time off the living. The rulers “extravagant festivities amounts to the squandering of historical time at the surface of society” (p.127). Historical time is the time of adventure and war for the rulers who are exposed and within real events, whereas those who are used for their temporal surplus value are locked within cyclical time of non-disruption and repetition, all without conflict.

The static society is one without conflict or change. It maintains itself through an equilibrium with the world by the constant maintenance of their institutions. These societies rely on total conformity to normalized social practises, where change is the impossible. Change is secured by the fear of the human and reverting back to animality. “The members of these societies remain human at the cost of always remaining the same” (130).

Modern industry begins to dissolve the cyclical mythological time of the people and  replaces it with the linear time of power and events. The linearity is mapped to the new found technology of the written word: “writing is the rulers weapon” (131). With this new and impersonal form of communication, where an impersonal memory of the administration and it’s archives, a new consciousness is not transmitted directly among the living. It is for this reason that “examining history amounts to examine the nature of power” (134).

As more people were exposed to historical time and became to gather a language of historical communication where each was recognized as possessors of a unique present, Judaism, and the monotheistic religions that sprang there from, recognized irreversible linear time but was limited within a singular final event, “the kingdom of God is soon to come”, a count down to the Last judgement and the coming of the true world:

Eternity came out of cyclical time and is beyond it. Eternity is the element which holds back the irreversibility of time, suppressing history within history itself by placing itself on the other side of irreversible time as a pure punctual element to which cyclical time returned and abolished itself. Bossuet will still say: “And by means of the time that passes we enter into the eternity which does not pass.” (136).

If life is only seen through its completion from beyond, the pilgrim becomes the symbol of life. Life becomes a one way journey whose real meaning lies elsewhere. The mystical world of the middle ages was attached with a melancholy of the decaying fading world, as end of myth no longer meant the world retuned but perished. Peasants revolted and responded to this history, trying to imagine their own utopian heaven on earth, the immanent Kingdom of God. But Christianity denounced this dream: the kingdom of God was the church, all else was superstition.

Work as labour time transformed historical conditions forever. The bourgeoisie economy eradicating any pockets of cyclic time found usually in largely agrarian societies. Now history was for all and not just for elite ruling classes. The irreversible time of the bourgeois economy brought a general movement that discovered the importance of political economy, the previously hidden ground of history. The time of the bourgeois economy is the time of things, commodities and  the production of objects that fluctuate on the surface of history. History itself, once a rarity, is transformed into a consumable item, the objects of yesterday now fetishized as the prestigious antiques of today. Although historical time was now known, it was not used: the worker is estranged from history but demands to live the historical time he produces:

In the demand to live the historical time which it makes, the proletariat finds the simple unforgettable centre of its revolutionary project; and every attempt (thwarted until now) to realize this project marks a point of possible departure for new historical life (143).

Historical time is the time of freedom, not the economic time of freedom to trade. Irreversible time becomes globally unified as the time of the market, not historical time, which doesn’t cut time up into synchronous fragments, themselves commodities to be traded as the general time of society. “Time is everything and man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time” (Marx). This time is time of nondevelopment, of consumable time, a pseudo-cyclical time infused with the commodified time of production, where blocks of time can be purchased as abstractions for pseudo-individualistic freedoms and decisions. The Spectacular commodity is a parcel of time containing an array of determined pleasures and guarantees: their vacuous consumption matches the vacuous credit they were purchased with.

Time saved by labour saving devices means more time in front of the TV or on vacation. These moments of real life are a retrieval of cyclical time, where their patterned repetition act as peaks and troughs of our life ‘enjoyment’ and feeling of ‘really’ living.

The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch without festivals. What was, in cyclical time, the moment of a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of life is impossible for the society without community or luxury. When its vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the dialogue and the gift, incite a surplus of economic expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the lower the use value of modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted. The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time.

The consumption of commodities is the repetition of the past expanded to include the commodified new. The vocabulary of which is ever expanding to create new territories of commodity desire and exchange. The historical past and everyday life remains without concepts and language as nowhere has it been recorded. It has been smothered by the Spectacles false memory that paralyses history through the Spectacle’s false consciousness of time. The Spectacle no longer has the drive towards the fulfilment of life or the recognition of death. Death is something to ‘plan’ for, with life insurance to make sure one goes out with a smooth monetary abstraction of ones value, the economy can profit from death and not create too much of a loss. Although death is not really seen, only Spectacularized by Hollywood, no one wants to grow old as they loose their ‘youth-capital’  as such there is no death and consequentially, little life,

Citizens of the Spectacle are estranged from the present through spatial alienation that separates them from their own time. What is needed is a federation of independent times all simultaneously present: the authentic temporal realization of authentic communism which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals” (163). This will liberate us from the extensive process of banalization that undermines the quality of places and spaces. Commodities are freer than people, as they can be spread with eagerness round the world in hours, where multilateral trade policies free trade zone allow the smooth passage of repeatable commodity space to become a frictionless plateaux on non-time and non-place.

Places become banalized when commodified into the Spectacle by the tourist industry. Anywhere in the world can be reached in a day, space has been lost and so has time. The development of transport media has exploded humanity around the world and imploded rural and urban areas into megalopolis centres of urban sprawl and rationalized ‘planned’ city spaces, where the Spectacle can self replicate through “peaceful coexistence within space” and outside time (170).Public spaces are squeezed until the streets themselves are suppressed, inducing isolation as a form of social control. Accommodation and family structures ensure antagonistic social relations are replicated across generations, while isolation of individuals in all areas of life (work and leisure) are to ensure pseudo-community prevails over genuine social solidarity.

Mass architecture meets mass transportation, with the dictatorship of the auto-mobile securing the necessity of road and motorway systems that de-distance the world and create greater dispersal. The city and country have nullified and paralysed each other by their inability to generate historical awareness. Consequentially, no historical movement based upon the recognition of the freedom of city has developed.  The history of the city under the tyranny of the administrative powers that castrate the city as a focal point of social power, while creating an apathetic and narrow minded parochial neopeasentry in the country, continues the repression of historical time with the forces of historical absence.

Proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to create places and events suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their lobar, but of their total history (178).

We must become aware of a style of dialectical theory. Debord calls this ‘detournement’, which is the reradicalization of previous conclusions that have been made respectable and so now lies. Progress depends upon the use and improvement of ideas and styles through their plagiarization and re-articulation. The style must be an abomination of the prevailing standards of language. This creates a style that points beyond culture through its negation. A unified social critique demands unfed social practice.

Critique is to expose ideology that distorts consciousness, yet produces real effects as the materialization of an abstract ideology. The Spectacle needs both materialism and idealism to function. The material of pseudo-concretness is reified by the objects that control our social life. Idealism is the dreamed activity that mediates the Spectacle through signs and signals into abstract ideals. this induces hallucinates which dominate our social life, until we no longer encounter others but are bound to a screen of Spectacle of a unilateral fiction dictated by our relation to fictions concerning commodities. the reaction to this is madness and schizophrenia, where superstition and magical techniques creep into social practices to fill the void left by the lack of historical agency. But these problems shouldn’t cause us to rush into our own Spectacle of pseudo-revolutionary action, but to know how to wait and to link ourselves to the real truth of an emancipatory universal history.

So, to summarize all too quickly:  Non-philosophy de-authorizes the Decision that correlates Levinas’ concepts from reciprocal determination of the Real, to concepts taken in their radical contingency. What was taken by Levinas as the condition and the conditioned (of the saying and the said) for ethics as first philosophy is without guarantee: ethics cannot be correlated to a principle governing all material reality (there can be no ethics-in-the-first-instance, as the Real is not ethical – the real is undetermined). Levinas via Laruellian dualysis can be seen to speak as a Stranger not as a philosopher, his concepts given over to the force (of) thought of his genuine address as ‘human disposition’ (his ‘postural flux’), the ‘material vulnerability’ of his “here I am”, freed from the ontological trap between the saying and the said.

In light of Laruelle’s Principles of a Generic ethics essay, Gangle lets causality of Levinas’ philosophy be disentangled from its ends and observed in the immanence of a ‘quarterial’ subject of means. This ‘quarterial’ subject stands not before the face of the Other but the face of the One, where ‘responsibility’ is not determined-in-the-first-instance but in the contingency of-the-last.

I hope to post a summary and explanation of Principles of a Generic Ethics as soon as I’m happy with it (I’ve finally got my head around some of the more abstract things in the article concerning circles, so I should be finished soon). I would like to compare his notion of means to that of Agamben’s ‘means without ends’ at some point, but Agamben I find is deceptively difficult, so I may need to re-read a few things before I make an attempt at that).

This  section below is from a WSWS article found HERE

Bea told the WSWS that a contact had provided him with a toxicity statement for Corexit, the dispersant BP is using—so far about 500,000 gallons have been dumped on the surface and near the seabed, and about 800,000 more gallons are on order. “It clearly says, if you breathe too much of it or if you ingest too much of it, if you let too much sit on your skin, it’ll kill you,” Bea said. “And of course I’m sitting here thinking if I’m a fish, I don’t know that.”

A Thursday report in the New York Times, “Less Toxic Dispersants Lose Out in BP Oil Spill Cleanup,” reveals that Corexit is one of the most highly toxic dispersants on the market, and one of the least effective.

“Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show,” according to Paul Quinlan of the Times’ Greenwire blog. “Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.”

(the above quote is from HERE)

So why is it being used? Once again, the most immediate profit concerns predominate. Corexit is produced by Nalco Co., a firm headed up by executives from both BP and industry leader Exxon. “It’s a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically,” said Richard Charter of Defenders of Wildlife.

and at that moment, I looked up from my window seat at my local coffee shop and what did I see directly in front of me in the road?. . .

photo taken from my seat at a coffee shop today using my phone's camera

I’m sure people have been converted for less. . .

The introductory piece by the editor Creston Davis sets the scene between the two theoretical juggernauts that are Slovoj Zizek and John Milbank. It is written in a theory laden and condensed manner that spell out the political implications and emancipatory stakes in both positions (as I exemplified in this quick quote post HERE). The point of the book is to overcome the myopia of contemporary public debates played out in the best sellers lists between figures such as Dawkins and McGrath by exposing the limitation of their rational dismissal of the other. Dawkins relies on belittling metaphors about spaghetti monsters to expose the absurd logic of theism while leaving the presumptions about his own use of reason and logic intact.

What Zizek and Milbank agree on is that the terms of debate need to be reassessed not rehashed and sold as lower-middle class coffee table reading or quotable toilet book material (such must be the destination for Hitchen’s rhetorical The Quotable Atheist). The point of tension for Zizek and Milbank is Hegel: the true thinker of the dialectic and therefore the thinker of the contradiction of atheism and fideism. This takes my mind back to my reading of After Finitude. Here’s a section from my notes that nicely summarizes the state of the situation:

Even after successfully critiquing meta-physico religiosity, this does not disprove God but only a type of God which appeals to natural reason to declare the superiority of its own beliefs. To remove proof of the ‘supreme’ supported by reason reverses the process of the destruction of polytheistic religion suffered at the hands of monotheistic religious reason (p.45). What does this produce? Fundamentalist fideism: a defence of religiosity in general which promotes the superiority of piety over thought, thus removing reason from any ground to a belief in God or gods. The result is a religionizing of reason: beliefs are legitimate as nothing but beliefs, not as reasonable beliefs (p.47). Philosophical works such as by Levinas pursue a sceptico-fideist closure of metaphysics dominated by the ‘wholly-other’ (p.48). Fideism is merely another name for strong correlationism. The correlationist cogito can thus be non-representational and institutes a species solipsism (rather than individual solipsism – Heidegger’s being-in-the-world could be a species solipsist claim).

For me, this was the best stuff from After Finitude, as it explained the resurgence of theology in the modern world impeccably. Obviously, Zizek is looking to reassert the Enlightenment logic of Hegel’s dialectic to overcome the end of the principle of sufficient reason where God is the guarantor of necessary and meaning existence. Milbank, however, is looking to reassert the primacy of theology through a positive ontology that answers Meillassoux’s concerns over the status  of reason itself. Both Zizek and Milbank are determined to use Hegel as the linchpin of their respective positions, but having only read Zizek’s part so far I cannot comment on just how Milbank appropriates the Hegelian dialectic.

For a good overview of how Zizek understands the subject to come from being torn asunder between a barred nature and culture, see my post on Adrian Johnston explaining the ambiguities of Zizek’s reading of the Lacanian ‘death drive’ HERE.

Zizek nicely summarizes his position again and again, here is an example:

It is easy to follow from this just how Zizek’s Communist politics dovetails nicely into this deduction: Communism is true birth of the holy ghost as love and solidarity between subjects that have overcome their reliance on transcendence and embraced the true meaning of Jesus’ message when he says “Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealest from thy neighbour and markest him to starve: for when hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbour to sin against the law” (p.70). Zizek interprets this to mean ‘property is theft’, to which Marx’s call for the abolition of private property is an echo of Jesus’ sermon!

Zizek goes on to use Meister Eckhart’s notion of the Godhead, the void-One beyond Word that Zizek will characterize as ‘un-God’. The un-God does not have positively existence (1) as it is nothing (0). Creation thus comes from nothing:

This lead into the final stretches of his chapter which frame his Hegelian dialectics within the atheistic confines of Badiou’s mathematical ontology: the background of multiple multiplicities of the void (as zero) which can never have a final substrata (‘the One is not’). This is materialist without the assertion of a foundational material density, but a materialism taken to its limit assumes only void. To demonstrate how the ground (0) is also the place of figuration (1) I’ll illustrate Zizek’s example using international floor numbering principles for buildings:

Poland has the  correct solution, Zizek assures us, as the ground floor is that which is “always-already given, and as such, cannot be counted”, but “the moment one starts to count the floors the ground floor itself must be counted as one”. The ground as nothing comes before any count, and anything that is counted has, ultimately, nothing as its ground. Zizek’s negative ontology converges with Badiou’s on this point, but separtes over the understanding of human animality.

Badiou’s seemingly realist stance towards man is that he is an animal that is governed by pleasure principle and mediated by the reality principle. The human animal becomes an (infinite) subject only through fidelity to Truth-proceedurs known as Events (which are unschematized openings, unlike Heideggerian Ereignis). Zizek chastises Badiou for not recognizing the way the subject retroactively constitutes his nature and thus has no natural nature, as Badiou insists, to be elevated from. For Zizek, the subject is already distorted by ‘death drive’ and thus it is only materialism that can explain consciousness, rather than as Badiou’s work suggests, the natural state of man can be understood through evolutionary-positivist type of materialism yet subjectivity proper can only be understood through his brand of materialism.

Zizek ends his piece with as statement of ‘infinite’ negation: “I believe in un-God”, as the pure form of belief deprived of its substantialization. It is clear from this why Zizek is known as a materialist theologian, as by following Badiou’s mathematical ontology, and theory of the subject, the quest for universality comes into view through the dialectizing of the logic of atheism and theism. Both Zizek and Badiou see the figure of St Paul as a model here (he universalized the teaching of Christ without placing them into prescriptive dogma): as it is through the Universality attempted by Christianity that becomes the model by which capital, which cannot fulfil the position of ‘a signifier that matters’ (Master-signifier), can be deposed.

There is a lot more from this chapter I would like to write about, but I will go into some more detail, primarily concerning Zizek’s reading of Eckhart, only after I have read through Milbank’s contribution.