k-punk
Spectres of Mark
... so Ccru wrote in its piece <a href=http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_swarm.htm> 'Swarmachines' </a>, as performed in the Hacienda at the Situationist Conference in 1995.
It is a reasoned antipathy to debate that has led to my hesitation about posting here over the past few weeks.
According to postmodern opinionism, there is no distinction to be drawn between argument and debate. Those who claim that it is possible to argue impersonally - that, in fact, argument MUST be impersonal - protest too much, so the opinionists would have us believe. Really, they are just rationalizing their own predilections, or else they are concealing such predilections behind a veil of impersonality.
There is no accident that this doctrine, which enjoys near ubiquitious support in the academy, the houses of parliament and amongst teenagers, has come to the fore at a time in which politics has all but been evacuated from public life. Opinionism is a systemically-cultivated (anti)political program which produces a simulacrum of the political - the increasingly threadbare and shabbily unconvincing spectacle of mediatized debate - as a distraction from the fact that politics has been supplanted by administration.
In spite of himself, naturally, Blair has done many favours to Anti-Capital, but perhaps chief amongst them is his long, slow destruction of any credibility that Kapitalist-Parliamentarianism might once have enjoyed. Hard to remember now, but in 97, Blair's messianism limited itself to British 'politics' (it did not yet, at least publicly, embrace ze vorld..); he promised to clean it up, restore vision where there was only short term instrumentalism. To say that exactly the opposite has happened scarcely gets near Blair's achievement in reducing parliament to a postmodern sideshow with dwindling audiences. It couldn't be clearer that the theatrical struggle between two groups of bourgeois lawyers is pure baboonery, nothing more. An unseemly mammalian conflict for Alpha-status.
Debates are an exchange of animal noises. Technically, there is no difference between an opinion and a grunt.
One of the things we must thank Badiou for is his insistence that politics cannot be about dying monkey flesh yakking. Paradoxically, what is unique about human beings is their capacity to distance themselves, through thought, from the biophysical substrate that makes such thought possible. What could be further from the conssnsus bio-miserablism played out as dreary parliamentary point-scoring or dressed up in the pious sub-theological clothing of the pathos of being-towards-death?
The opposition between argument and rhetoric is of course far from new. But what is new is the subsumption of the former within the latter. (Or perhaps not: perhaps times of 'apparently triumphant' conservativsm are always facilitated by this equivocation. Sophistry is an indispensable (anti)political weapon, after all.)
The powers that be have succeeded in lowering the bar so much that if you cite thinking and behaving rationally and ethically as a GOAL, you will be howled down by a chorus of depressed-enraged monkeys for getting ahead of yourself, being arrogant, setting yourself up as x or y. This is already a great triumph for Anthropol. That's it, ease back into your armchair, switch on the games console, crack open the six pack, because hey, what's the point, everyone's as bad as everyone else, we're all tortured monkeys in hell, all we can do is numb the pain - and anyone who says or thinks anything different is either deluded or dogmatic, or both. The endemic depression amongst westerners is a direct consequence of this obligatory relativistic organic-reductionism. No God, no politics, no cause, nothing bigger than our selves - which have expanded to envelop the cosmos at precisely the same time that they have been evacuated of even the pretence of substantive content. Nothing worth striving for except keeping our burrows clean and providing more meat puppets for the merry go round.
In what superficially looks like an irony, it is only under utterly artifiical Kapital, with its ruthless destruction of the Sacred, that humanity is reduced to the porcine level of organisms snouting for satiation. It was not in an always illusory state of nature that humanity was an animal pursuing the satisfaction of 'needs'; it only in desacralized Kapital that this can happen.
The role of 'religion', the role of politics, has always been to provide an escape route from reproducer animality (no accident that it is only under capitalism that having a child becomes a 'right'). To break out of the animal cage that we are born into is far from easy. But even the thought that such an escape is possible is immediately an exhilarating Gnostic flash amidst the dulling black sun of lethargo-carnality.
It is a reasoned antipathy to debate that has led to my hesitation about posting here over the past few weeks.
According to postmodern opinionism, there is no distinction to be drawn between argument and debate. Those who claim that it is possible to argue impersonally - that, in fact, argument MUST be impersonal - protest too much, so the opinionists would have us believe. Really, they are just rationalizing their own predilections, or else they are concealing such predilections behind a veil of impersonality.
There is no accident that this doctrine, which enjoys near ubiquitious support in the academy, the houses of parliament and amongst teenagers, has come to the fore at a time in which politics has all but been evacuated from public life. Opinionism is a systemically-cultivated (anti)political program which produces a simulacrum of the political - the increasingly threadbare and shabbily unconvincing spectacle of mediatized debate - as a distraction from the fact that politics has been supplanted by administration.
In spite of himself, naturally, Blair has done many favours to Anti-Capital, but perhaps chief amongst them is his long, slow destruction of any credibility that Kapitalist-Parliamentarianism might once have enjoyed. Hard to remember now, but in 97, Blair's messianism limited itself to British 'politics' (it did not yet, at least publicly, embrace ze vorld..); he promised to clean it up, restore vision where there was only short term instrumentalism. To say that exactly the opposite has happened scarcely gets near Blair's achievement in reducing parliament to a postmodern sideshow with dwindling audiences. It couldn't be clearer that the theatrical struggle between two groups of bourgeois lawyers is pure baboonery, nothing more. An unseemly mammalian conflict for Alpha-status.
Debates are an exchange of animal noises. Technically, there is no difference between an opinion and a grunt.
One of the things we must thank Badiou for is his insistence that politics cannot be about dying monkey flesh yakking. Paradoxically, what is unique about human beings is their capacity to distance themselves, through thought, from the biophysical substrate that makes such thought possible. What could be further from the conssnsus bio-miserablism played out as dreary parliamentary point-scoring or dressed up in the pious sub-theological clothing of the pathos of being-towards-death?
The opposition between argument and rhetoric is of course far from new. But what is new is the subsumption of the former within the latter. (Or perhaps not: perhaps times of 'apparently triumphant' conservativsm are always facilitated by this equivocation. Sophistry is an indispensable (anti)political weapon, after all.)
The powers that be have succeeded in lowering the bar so much that if you cite thinking and behaving rationally and ethically as a GOAL, you will be howled down by a chorus of depressed-enraged monkeys for getting ahead of yourself, being arrogant, setting yourself up as x or y. This is already a great triumph for Anthropol. That's it, ease back into your armchair, switch on the games console, crack open the six pack, because hey, what's the point, everyone's as bad as everyone else, we're all tortured monkeys in hell, all we can do is numb the pain - and anyone who says or thinks anything different is either deluded or dogmatic, or both. The endemic depression amongst westerners is a direct consequence of this obligatory relativistic organic-reductionism. No God, no politics, no cause, nothing bigger than our selves - which have expanded to envelop the cosmos at precisely the same time that they have been evacuated of even the pretence of substantive content. Nothing worth striving for except keeping our burrows clean and providing more meat puppets for the merry go round.
In what superficially looks like an irony, it is only under utterly artifiical Kapital, with its ruthless destruction of the Sacred, that humanity is reduced to the porcine level of organisms snouting for satiation. It was not in an always illusory state of nature that humanity was an animal pursuing the satisfaction of 'needs'; it only in desacralized Kapital that this can happen.
The role of 'religion', the role of politics, has always been to provide an escape route from reproducer animality (no accident that it is only under capitalism that having a child becomes a 'right'). To break out of the animal cage that we are born into is far from easy. But even the thought that such an escape is possible is immediately an exhilarating Gnostic flash amidst the dulling black sun of lethargo-carnality.