Recording Surface

Two (more) recent Bartlebys, at Culture Machine and Immanent Multiplicity, both via Agamben and his notion of potentiality. Timothy Dienes, in CM, reads around Agamben’s (and others’) “claims of immanence and subjectivity” to reach “Nancy’s thought of communication and community.” It’s a provocative article that also touches on decision-making, justice, and freedom.

Jason Adams, in IM, reads through Agamben’s Bartleby and the recent flare-up in the U.S. of border-fortification mania and the possibility for catching new lines of flight: (more…)

Brian Massumi, in a bit of epoch-making(pdf), on what changed after “the day that changed everything” (via). (more…)

More events from yesterday, and a brief comment. First, in Dallas the authorities have become irritated and derisive: (more…)

The school walkouts that have followed the big marches over the past few weeks are rippling across the U.S.–even in Texas–as more kids in more places are joining in, despite veiled threats from school administrators, who worry about the effect the absences will have on the federal money they recieve. Predictably, the state’s response is becoming increasingly militarized and repressive.

Meantime: Compared to Congress, the president gets to seem like a principled antiracist, while making it clear that the needs of capital dictate immigration policy. Progressives worry that Democrats are being unfairly lumped together with the president (when of course they are mostly worse). Media makes sure we know that the protests are an illegal-immigrant-only affair. And labor unions expres solidarity with immigrants, while letting it be known they should be kept out at all cost.

[Long Sunday is hosting a symposium on Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of the Refusal,” which started on Monday. Some really smart people are making contributions, and I’m looking forward to a week of their takes (see here for background and the schedule of posts). My contribution went up today, and I’ve crossposted it below.]

Deleuze says somewhere that the beginning and the end are merely points, that it’s the middle that is truly interesting. So it is for Tronti, who almost despite himself affirms that in the struggle against capital the action takes place in the center. For Tronti, the middle is the place of the refusal, nestled between the beginning, the workers as a “class for itself,” and the end, the workers as a party demanding “total power.” Near the end of “The Strategy of the Refusal,” even as he insists that we must move beyond passivity and noncollaboration and as he avows his teleological commitment to the party form, Tronti reiterates that the struggle should be based on “the working class refusal to present demands to capital, the total rejection of the whole trade union terrain, the refusal to limit the class relationship within a formal, legal, contractual form.” (more…)

Are the strikes, blockades, and protests that seem to occur more frequently and with more vigor in France than in the rest of Europe possible because it has the lowest unionization rate on the continent? If the fight against the contract laws were being waged in, say, Germany, would the wide range of social grievances be subsumed to the trade unions’ “limited demands of … facing an employer“? I wonder if French social movements are able to move quickly and effectively in times like these because of their tolerance for difference and refusal to fetishize unity.

As usual, Archive is asking the right questions about leftist reports on the protests: Why are these events seen as separate from the riots in the banlieus, the No vote on the EU constitution, the strikes of the 90s, etc? History, after all, didn’t stop in May ‘68 and restart just this week.

Following is a long quote from Warren Montag’s essay in the latest issue of Borderlands, Althusser and Us (via), which has some excellent stuff.

I like this quote very much, but I wonder if histories of genesis aren’t in their own way a defining of limits, a conceptual drawing of lines between existence and nonexistence, a presupposing of a collective subject that enacts a fissure within history. Does it matter if they do? (more…)

The long and difficult section on the unconscious in the long and difficult chapter on repetition in Difference and Repetition is Deleuze’s description of the site of the “passive synthesis” that occurs in the contemplating mind. The name for this passive synthesis is habit, “the foundation from which all other psychic phenomena derive.” Deleuze insists on passivity because the goal of active synthesis is “global integration,” in the form of representation and unity. Only passive synthesis can maintain multiplicity, because it does not dissolve the “thousands of habits of which we are composed” into a unified subject. (more…)

From this article on Latin American reaction to the U.S. House of Representatives’ bill proposing a 700-mile wall to separate California, Arizona, and parts of Texas from Mexico:

“Comparisons of proposals to alter our border policies to the Berlin Wall are not only disingenuous and intellectually dishonest, they are personally offensive to me,” [U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony] Garza wrote in a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy. “The Berlin Wall was built to keep its own people trapped inside, and was created by an oppressive authoritarian government.”

Democratic, exclusionary walls=good. Authoritarian, inclusionary walls=bad.

One of the unfortunate aspects of having children is that it’s occasionally necessary to consult parenting books. We do this during crisis: when real-life situations overwhelm our confidence in our parenting skills or when one of the kids reaches a developmental turning point. Reading these books is usually a dreadful experience, as they tend toward clinical enumeration of developmental milestones, New Age solipsism, or feel-good humanism. Despite their philosophical leanings, the point of all of them, stated or not, is to supply parents the tools needed to (micro)manage and control their children, ensuring their docility and obedience. (more…)