What was I thinking?!?

Originally emailed on 10.17.2001

Notre Temps Est Venu/Our Time has Come, mixed media on canvas, 2010.  Erik Bulatov.  

 

 

anyway, history in itself (as contingency, real possibility, etc.) is not rational, though it is not made any more rational in interpretative thinking (as in empirical/positive science, most historiography).  for me (a hegelian), there is a co-productivity of thinking and history (subject-object), thus conceptually comprehensive cognition of historical development as opposed to the record of historical succession (some i'm sure are put off by the dialectic of reason, often equated with "progress").  in this sense, too, there is a logic to counter-revolution and retrogression in historical development.  otherwise, you have what by now is a naive historicism (most in the right and the left despite ideological differences) or the usual relativism and conjectural judgment of what-ifs (although things are up for grabs in the game).  i would even say contra almost all that there is a rationality to counter-revolution, that this is the "negative" with which we must necessarily tarry - modern history is replete with examples if not the stupid present situation...one shouldn't merely get stuck on semantical representation.  if dialectics is development (historical or otherwise) thru contradiction/otherness, if revolution is the movement of absolute negativity, then i dunno why adherents of dialectical thinking leave out the so-called bad things (or is it Ding-an-sich, the beyond in various ways of revolutionary consciousness?).  alas, i think there is only a handful of honest revolutionaries contra those who want some ethical-practical solution (which is exactly bourgeois intellectual intuition and the flip side of socialist utopia) and sometimes in the name of some self-styled philosophy.  there is the further consideration, not only "being against" but "being for," the new society in-and-for-itself if you will - well, this still can't happen without a relentless self-critique in philosophy, which is quite lacking...revolutionary essence still needs to realize its concept.

Gil Scott-Heron R.I.P.

Who'll Pay Reparations on My Soul?, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970)

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised  (1974)

The revolution as it is still will not be televised, since it is non-being...perhaps shown only in the ellipsis of disaster's writing. 

Running, I'm New Here (2010)

Egypt, against universalism

english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2011/02/2011238843342531.html

I want to revisit this Riz Khan segment from Al Jazeera English, with Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek. 

I think it's ineptly, chauvinistically, and coercively titled "Egypt's Revolution: Can the Popular Uprising Lead to Real Political Change?"  From the get-go, it dooms other possibilities, political or otherwise.  This is reinforced by Ramadan and Žižek despite their words of good conscience that attempt to critique the West's prejudices and hypocrisy toward the Muslim world. 

What's most insulting is Žižek's shoddy shibboleth: "we are all universalists" (4:06).  By being proud for the Egyptians because "they understand democracy by doing what they are doing better than we do in the West" (5:16), he might as well as say that they're more West than the West...so who cares about their specific culture(s)?, this hindrance to solidarity's universal that is general exchange.  Žižek's thinking itself is an ideological symptom.  It's a somewhat valid observation that Islamic fundamentalism filled the void of the Left (14:33), but there was also a void in the Left itself, which could be bad but could be good, a cipher.  Žižek's is a nostalgia for a failed utopia, and the chore of dusting off the memorabilia on the shelves.  Even in the multilinear theory of history, why doom an insurrection to the politico-philosophic circuit of a ravenous incorporating Geist?  We can't even "let the dead bury their dead" (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) because Žižek proposes to let the dead resurrect their dead.  And we know from movies, when zombies can't cannibalize the living, they cannibalize themselves. 

Elucidating for me anyways, some passages in Baudrillard's texts collected in The Agony of Power:

"The high point of the struggle against domination was the historic movement of liberation, be it political, sexual, or otherwise - a continuous movement, with guiding ideas and visible actors.

But liberation also occurred with exchanges and markets, which brings us to this terrifying paradox: all of the liberation fights against domination only paved the way for hegemony, the reign of general exchange - against which there is no possible revolution, since everything is already liberated.

Total revolt responds to total order, not just dialectical conflict.  At this point, it is double or nothing: the system shatters and drags the universal away in its disintegration.  It is vain to want to restore universal values from the debris of globalization.  The dream of rediscovered universality (but did it ever exist?) that could put a stop to global hegemony, the dream of a reinvention of politics and democracy and, as for us, the dream of a Europe bearing an alternative model of civilization opposed to neoliberal hegemony - this dream is without hope.  Once the mirror of universality is broken (which is like the mirror stage of our modernity), only fragments remain, scattered fragments.  Globalization automatically entails, in the same movement, fragmentation and deepening discrimination - and our fate is for a universe that no longer has anything universal about it - fragmentary and fractal - but that no doubt leaves the field free for all singularities: the worst and the best, the most violent and the most poetic."