Cyborg takeover

World War One was the final death throe of the old feudal order, which had clung to the principle of absolute monarchy across Europe and Japan long after its social and cultural bases had withered away. In its last agony, it lashed out at all of humanity, kings ordering the deaths of their own populations by the million. The current world order has responded to the implosion of 2008 by doing the same thing on a global scale. Perfectly aware that consumerism – demanded by the ongoing crises of overproduction, stalled by falling purchasing power and financed by the gigantic Ponzi scheme of derivatives markets – can only end in ecological disaster, still it drives on. The rising tide of poverty sinks all boats. The war of corporate capital against humanity reveals the awful truth. Against a background of science fiction dystopias, the cyborgs have taken over. The actually existing cyborg is the corporation, an entity without shame, loyalty, honour or love, composed of massively connected computer networks into which human biochips are inserted and trained. Motivated solely by profit, controlled only by shareholders which turn out to be themselves also corporate cyborgs (pension funds, banks), these monsters are prepared to diminish the world, to the point of destruction, so long as they can continue to pursue their single-minded obsession with economic growth. Shell, Exxon Mobil, Sinopec, China National Petroleum, BP and Total from the petroleum sector; Toyota and Volkswagen from the automotive; together with energy giant State Grid and retailer WalMart complete the Fortune 500 Global top ten of 2013. Is it any wonder that they have bought governments, defeated attempts to curtail global warming, and driven the world's wars for decades? Bankers and presidents are merely paid lackeys of these inhuman and anti-human colossi. To understand that cyborg capital has invaded the planet and means us harm is the first step towards rebellion.

Against catastrophism

The tenth of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, the one that follows the famous passage about Klee's angel, says in part that 'Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians' stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their "mass basis", and, finally, their servile integration into an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing'.

Our professional politicians are doing the same thing, in the UK, Australia, the US. Servants of a market they neither can nor will attempt to rein in, confident that they speak for the bigotry and avarice they ascribe to us citizens, the only difference from post-Weimar fascism is that they no longer believe in progress.

Benjamin warns that we will have to change our customary thinking if it is not to play into the hands of these servile politicians. He saw the need for socialists to abandon the idea of progress tainted by its association with inter-war European fascism. Today however, there can no longer be any doubt that both the market and our polity embrace the catastrophic consequences of neo-liberalism as their own; and that therefore radical thought must abandon its own love affair with the spectacle of catastrophe – its enchantment with eco-apocalypse and the collapse of community.

The War on War

The world's leaders hum and hah over the Ba'ath assault on its own population with chemical weapons because chemical warfare has been a platform of UK and US weaponry at least since 1991 and deployed in the Gulf and in the Balkans in hundreds of tons. Many of us want to believe that Obama is a decent man, trying to do right in a wrong world. So perhaps he can't stomach the hypocrisy. Depleted uranium is not 'chemical' in only the most bureaucratic sense: it's nuclear, but it interacts chemically at the cellular level. Given testimony like Malcolm Hooper's 1999 lecture on the aftermath of Gulf war uranium shelling, the US Dept of defense and its UK equivalent waited till 2008 to make any kind of admission, and then only in the most guarded language, and in relation to their own forces, not the civilians still living where the material (half-life 4bn years) is. As Rob Nixon writes, this slow violence never figures in accounts of the 'surgical' strike and the 'hundred hours war', reported as spectacle and celebration, vaunted as humanitarian.

JFK's war on poverty was such a success that Reagan decided to wage a war on drugs. When that was such a huge success, Bush declared a war on terror. Today it seems the US is ready to declare war on war. God help us all.

The Quantum Crowd

from a chapter called "Defining the Public in Piccadilly Circus" for a forthcoming collection on public screens and transnational cultures edited by Nikos Papastergiadis and Scott McQuire.

The public that threatened in the early 20th century to become mass became instead the lonely crowd, and the lonely crowd in turn has become a circuit of managed desires no longer adding up to individuals. When Laclau (2005) describes the unit of populist politics as demands, he approaches an understanding of this new condition, where the units are neither social nor individual but desires in movement, unanchored from biography and mobilised in currents through the tides of quotidian human affairs. The process by which communities and extended families were reduced to the nuclear family of the classic consumer society of Keynesianism continued in the Bretton Woods era to produce as unit of consumption the atomised individual. Neo-liberalism, coinciding with personal computing, internet and mobile media, encouraged the break-up of the individual, just as the previous regime encouraged the break-up of the nuclear family in an epidemic of divorce. Now only unanchored desires function as sub-individual social particles. We have moved from the molecular family to the atomic individual and thence to the quantum dynamic of desire, at which point the art of managing desires takes over from politics as the conduct of public life.

Narcopolitics and the suicidal drive of neo-liberalism

excised from a piece I'm writing for Millennium Film Journal's 35th anniversary issue

As Baudrillard wrote,
When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself (Baudrillard 2001).
9/11 made visible the suicide enacted by neo-liberalism and its symbolic twin towers. The suicide of the bombers is no different from the trajectory of neo-liberal consumerism. The death of nature is not an act of murder: it is a symptom of another malaise, species suicide, conducted at the level of species by agents – corporations – that have already ex-corporated their humanity and uploaded their consciousness to corporate databases, no longer buffeted by wind and rain but only by the vagaries of chaotic markets they no longer wish to understand or control. The stupidity of fracking, of Arctic oil extraction, of nuclear facilities, of arming all sides in proxy wars, even the immense assault on the global poor is not in itself genocidal because it is integral to the suicide pact capital has signed with itself: to eradicate the world it is built on in order to ensure its own self-murder.

The silence of the silent majority is now punctuated by the murder-suicides of despairing cast-offs of the corporate system, banging away with Wallmart guns at whatever attracts their rage, in this emulating what destroys them, before making the futurological sacrifice, a signpost to the teleology of neo-liberalism , by turning the gun on themselves. America does not need imported terrorists: these lost souls perform the ritual of terror for them, protected and encouraged by the corporate lobby.

We speak of 'state terror' but even the worst states enact in haste what corporations enact at leaisure, and then only in cahoots with the corporations that pay for governments, often in the currency of the very arms they use to terrorise their populations. We should instead speak, like Rob Nixon, of the slow violence, the slow terrorism, of debt, despair and drugs (prescribed as well as illegal)

Narcopolitics is at the forefront of the suicidal economics of integral waste. Not content to treat bodies as externalities, dumping grounds for the over-production of toxic fats and sugars, narcopolitics pollutes the reservoirs of its last resource, the minds that manipulate its symbols, that provide the creative engines of innovation on which its cycles of built-in obsolescence depend.

This is the savage contradiction of capitalist growth; and it is this contradiction alone that allows creativity the space between waste and suicide, to clamber over the inert forms of parties and corporations, to produce the conditions for a politics worthy of the name.

Shame and the banks

To the tune of Richard and Linda Thompson's For Shame of Doing Wrong'

The UK government is floating the idea of jailing bankers who transgress good practice. There is little point, though I admit I'd get a jolt of Shadenfreude like anybody else. As someone said on C4 news tonight, the CEO will always say his (always his) financial advisors, staff, board and shareholders all supported him in malpractice. This is because banks are not composed of people

Banks are cyborgs: very large machines with human biochips plugged in. You cannot blame the biochips when the machine employs them for interests utterly divorced from theirs, or any human's.

The motive of corporate cyborgs are not human. They know only one goal: to accumulate wealth. They do not share human goals like happiness or well-being or spending the afternoon drunk in the arms of their beloved. Most of all they know no shame.

Shame is one of the most human of emotions – though I'm sure at least some animals also feel it. Our capacity for shame is proof of our inescapable commitment to the other. It is the bitter wound left by failure to give, or give enough. Shame is not embarrassment or regret, not gentle remorse: but the stabbing pain of memory. Bankers might individually feel shame: if not, they are clearly psychopaths and need our care and therapy. But banks do not feel shame.

Banks externalise shame. Where we might feel the agenbite of inwit, they export shame, and not for the past but the future. As debtors, we feel the shame; shame becomes ours, and pervasive, as we are all dragged into mortgages, pensions and credit. Shame is a pollutant emitted by banks in the shape of debt because shame is, from the perspective of the pure accumulation of wealth, external. Banks dump shame into the external environment like factories dump toxins. It is important therefore to realise that we should never be ashamed of toxic debt because lending, not borrowing, is toxic.

Banks are constitutionally incapable of shame, and thus inhuman. Not the singer, then, but the song needs to be attacked. It is to our shame that we have permitted banks to become the most powerful agents of history. These inhuman, shameless cyborgs must be terminated.

Net.control, climate politics and a defense of angels

Isn't it wonderful what goverments can do when they set their minds to it? The UK govenrment (Tory wing) are stumbling over their dif for net surveillance while the BRICK countries move once more to get the ITU to take over the running of the internet (ITU being a UN body is responsible to nation-states; but given the deregulation of telecoms is now also subject to the will of corporate members). For some details check New Scientist, the daring if clumsily named WCITleaks and internet governance consultants nxt who have published the restricted documents from the discussions. Avaaz have also started a petition, and there are more links from their site. So there is always the possibility of getting political movement when enough power is brokered through UN agencies. But what about issues where nation states don't want top change? The Doha meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just broke up with almost nothing to show for istelf: a pitifully small fund, marked by foot-dragging in actual payments, for poor regions devastated by weather whose probabilities are reckoned to be increased through emissions from the welthy. And, er, that's about it. The Irish Times has a suitably downbeat account from one campaigner: “We lobby and campaign so hard to move things forward, but all we get are crumbs from the table.” Apparently more US citizens believe in the existence of angels than accept the reality of climate change. They may have something there. The internet may not be the engine of wisdom we once hoped it might be; but an internet censored by the Saudis will be an engine of stupidity. We might need some angels: our politicians are clearly failing at anythng useful, wise or good.

The Hour of the Great refusal

from a talk at the Digital Aesthetics 3 event held in Preston earlier in October 2012. The talk was an angry rant about waste in digtial media which gradually turned into a meditation on the intense, poetic essay that is John Akomfrah's film The Nine Muses.

Digital media, and perhaps especially digital visual media, are time-based arts. The shutter opens, light pours in, but from that moment on the CCD and CMOS chips organise light by sampling and sub-sampling, organising the emitted electrons in channels before applying the clock-function to drain them into store. Like the scanned display, the electronic image is already temporal; but unlike older tube cameras, the Red One and similar HD digital cameras operate like film in the first instance – the open shutter, the chemical reaction to the presence of photons – and like film has its moment of latency when the tiny electrochemical response is amplified. But then the new internal temporality of the frame distinguishes them: there is no complete image in electronic media.

This incompleteness is beautiful. It denies the wholeness of the unified commodity, embracing the unstable movements of demand. The ancestors inhabiting the machine crowd out wholeness. As In his recent book on What Cinema Is, Dudley Andrew approvingly cites Serge Daney: 'The Cahiers axiom is this: the cinema has a rapport with the real, and that the real is not what is represented. And that's final'. Unlike some film scholars, he does not distinguish on the basis of digitality, but on the ambition to capture realia that do not give themselves to vision, like the holocausts haunting Resnais' Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Electronic images are incomplete so that they can escape the universal: they must inhabit time.

. . .

The intimate ecology of everything which I call mediation had to be ripped apart to constitute communication. Communication at this first moment is the means by which domination and expropriation are secured. At the same time, communication makes explicit, precisely by separating, the interdependence of people, albeit to the exclusion of things and world (techne and physis). As automation expands from the factory organisation of humans and ancestors to the internet of things and the ubiquitous surveillance of natural processes, it begins to reopen the world closed by the universality of the commodity form and probabilistic management of populations. The vast statistical warehouse of indifferent data begins to yield to the specificity – irreducible and im-mense (immeasurable) – of the anecdote. The new crowd is no longer population as indifferent mass but peer-to-peer mutuality of singularities, particles aligned by the magnetism of their shared desires.

The Nine Muses never suggests that “the immigrant” is a viable category of knowledge or experience: each fragment opens onto another world, another story. The specificity of each is maintained, but without sacrificing what is common to them. To stand in a world that refuses, and yet which is home; to travel hopefully.

happiness

The eudaemonist believes in happiness as a good, indeed the Good. The judicious eudaemonist Aristotle weighted various claims and decided that the life of the mind was the greatest happiness. We might like to say: beauty, love, the contemplation or cultivation of plants, animals and landscapes . . . Our happinesses are idiosyncratic, but everyone recognizes that some are more trustworthy or (not necessarily the same thing) longer lasting. Things we buy rarely make us happy in the same way dappled shade or embracing your beloved do.

Politics should be no less than the quest for happiness, for the conditions of happiness. The US Constitution backs down here: the right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same as happiness as the pre-eminent goal of the polis.

How are we to be happy? The question has two terms: who is this 'we'? And what is this common happiness (or should it be happinesses?)? I take from Adorno the principle that neither I nor we have the right to demand that anyone – not I, not we, not, certainly, they – should sacrifice happiness for some higher goal: there is no higher goal. We should suffer no unhappiness in ourselves or in others, no matter what pretense of greater or deferred good.

Happiness is not a right but a duty. Something we must strive for. Happiness as Agamben notes in his little essay on Magic (in Profanations) is never deserved or earned. It comes to us by luck or by magic, but it never comes if we – this still mysterious we – remove the condition of its possibility. One of the myriad ways we can do that is by destroying our environments, urban or natural, or for that matter cultural. A poisoned environment reduces the chances of happiness, and for that formal reason alone is to be fought against.

Happiness is not a personal goal. The persona is a mask, a performance for an audience – for mother, lover, child, boss, employee, student, teacher . . . Today we perform our multiple personae on blogs, microblogs, social media sites, SMS . . . each performing a facet and perhaps some kind of truth about our selves leaks out, but we know that in each instance we do not and cannot put out into the world everything we are, have been and can become. We are traversed by joys and fears that are not our own: a sporting win, a fiscal crisis. We are perpetually other than ourselves, and so cannot be selfish in looking for happiness.

Nor can we be happy in the presence of pain. Though we have inured ourselves to beggars, and learned to triumph at another's cost, the toy snatched form another child is always a poisoned chalice, and we scarcely know how to enjoy what we fail to share. If each of us is equipped with instinctual drives to survive, reproduce and shape the immediate environs to our comfort, we have learned that these ends are worst achieved alone: in this at least Hobbes was right. Our happiness is framed and formed in the need for the other, to make babies, prepare food, and build worlds, and as the necessary audience for our performances of self. Happiness is framed and formed again by our participation in the other's survival, reproduction, comfort and performance. The illimitable demand of the Other is not ethical, as Levinas stipulates, but political: the polis of the human that requires absolutely the happiness of others in order to find the happiness that is mine.

Our desires are not ours alone. Great tides of need sweep us up, sweep through our very veins and synapses. The same forces that make us individual make us social. Each of us is a nexus of the same needs and desires that forms and frames our fellows. This is that becoming-human which, severally and in unison, we embark upon with our first cries, and which maps out the task of the polis, of politics as conducting towards the Good Life, and the associations and movements we create in pursuit of it.

Alas. The institutional politics of actually existing polities are machines for defining exclusively the 'us' who deserve happiness. Since happiness cannot be deserved, this mode of polity – ours, based on wealth as privation (property as the right to deprive another of the enjoyment thereof) – therefore both destroys happiness and makes it impossible (because such polities pretend that happiness is possible only for an 'us' at the expense of a 'them'). Debt is the invention of a future absolutely dependent on the past. To that extent, our economic system is designed to kill the future as the open possibility of magic and therefore to kill the very possibility of happiness.

Happiness cannot exist in the abstract but only in the concrete, specific instance. We give only 'selves' to surveillance and to electoral politics: performances couched in clichés that lend themselves to management. Such selves and their efficient aggregations define human yearning, joy and suffering as norms and deviations. But we live in unique situations and events, not averages. Whenever the study of people takes on a scientific style (taxonomic psychologies, the pseudo-science of economics divorced from politics) it fails in its duty to happiness. The only truthful evidence is anecdotal, just as the only credible ethics is one that decides each act on its own conditions, not those of a rule.

Redefining the 'us' so that it includes non-humans redefines the human and the nonhuman, and happiness as what can only be achieved in common, in future, and in particular. We do not save a forest by starving its inhabitants; nor do we save the inhabitants by destroying the forest. Unlike freedom, which Mandela claimed to be indivisible but which is everywhere divided between the freedom of the rich and the debt-slavery of the poor, happiness is indivisible; but it is also (unlike freedom) multiple. As long as the happinesses of the forest and its inhabitants are mutually exclusive, we have failed.

This is where the real work begins

The Second Time as Farce

When Thatcher compared herself with Churchill and invaded the Malvinas, it was, as James Maxton said of Ramsey Macdonald, 'a bloody tragedy'. When William Hague compares his faltering party with Lady Finchley over a phantom fuel strike, it's a farce.

The crumbling Church of England already revealed that the vicar's trousers have fallen down. Now all we need is the au pair in the cupboard: at last a role for Sarkozy.

Ecocritique

(snatched from a talk prepared for the Ubiquitous Computing seminar in Copenhagen)

The subject-object relation is a facet of the population-environment relation fundamental to the political economy of governmentality and the commodity form. Resistance takes many forms. Mystics undertake spiritual disciplines, and many artists undertake a kind of disciplined nostalgia, in search of a pre-subjective, pantheistic experience, innocent of the social and historical division of the human away from the world. Eco-critics look in the opposite direction: not to the past of amorphous unity with the world, but towards a post-objectal subjectivity, a post-objective accommodation with the world. There are already signs of such relations. Neo-liberalism takes as fundamental the ideally-informed consumer. Joseph Stieglitz has demonstrated the impossibility of such a figure. In its place, however, the universal, automated recommendations of information capitalism transfer that ideal of total information from the subject to the environment: the datasphere knows your needs and tastes, and how to satisfy them, far better than you ever will. We are moving away from the Freudian subject as we are from the Foucauldian self. Our land, tools, knowledge and increasingly our bodies are no longer our own, but aspects of the environment we inhabit, the relations with which are managed in a hybrid of governmentality and the commodity form we can call the database economy. We need therefore to consider how we are to manage the task that we still have before us, the incomplete project of becoming human.

Riots and rumours

listening to the morning radio news, politicians making absurd statements, crowned by Clegg (deputy PM, Liberal of the kind the word 'wet' was invented for) saying that the priority was more police, trials and sentencing, and (ugly, new cliché) "in the weeks and months to come" we could "have the sociological debate".

The same day, reflection on the story about the Taliban assault on US troops at the weekend, with a US diplomat having to defend opening talks with the rebels

The people who might be able to help, humanities and social scholars who work on the idea of value, are excluded, because the doctrine in the UK is STEM (sci-tech-engineering-medecine) subjects in schools and universities, and focused funding in the research councils. Vast sums of money for arms development. No sums of money for political scientists, or cultural analysts. Spend your money and effort blasting the bejesus out of the looters, then send in a couple of counsellors . . . . and then deride them as do-gooders, and say they failed.

The UK has the highest proportion of population in prison in western europe. Doesn't seem to have made it a nicer spot (the extreme incarceration policy of the US has likewise proved an abject failure). Five minutes observing such "sociological debates" might save years of destruction (and, to put in terms the politicians might understand, expense).

But most of all you can blame the politicians (hurrah!). Why do angry young people not join the Labour Party? Because it doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't organise anger, it doesn't articulate their demands. It doesn't provide a poetical education. It is a visionless machine for getting into power. Why don't they engage in politics? Because the only value any politician talks about is money. There is NO political life in electoral politics after the third way: its all consensus (hence the marketing techniques, focus groups etc). As Mouffe says, if you don't have arguments, the repressed demands come back as violence. In this case expressed in the only terms understandable to kids who were 8 or 10 or 12 in 2008 when the depression began. The only values society has ever preached to them are consumerist. Their only economic function – in a society exclusively devoted to economics – is consumption.

There have been some intelligent observations, notably that blaming parents who were scarcely adolescent when they gave birth is not helpful. Ignorance is socially produced: and for those made ignorant by carefully restricted social policies the last knowledge is carnal. They don't own anything both in the sense of being poor, and in that the few things they do possess are so cheap and disposable it makes you weep.

So for their ignorance we will undoubtedly blame "the media" - this time round social media. But the mediation that links their lives with the rest of the world are far more obvious and material than that. Media specialists need to be far more specific than tabloid journalists. In this case,the media we can blame are environmental. Blame the urban planners and the architects, people who design Kwiksave stores like rat-runs. banks like Judge Dredd's bunker. And then blame the food industry for the deracinated chemical goo that substitutes for eating, the individuated packets that militate against the medium of shared meals. Look at the chemistry of the food targeted at the age-range at the heart of the matter. Then you might have a handle on why getting a rush is an embedded addiction among young people: they were weaned on sugar and caffeine. What shows on a screen is a great deal less persuasive than the environment you inhabit or the food you eat.

Then blame the schools. For decades the combination of plummeting wages and status of teachers, and universities profiting from the cursory, contentless degrees now served up in the schools of Ed they took over since the 1960s make teaching a really crap profession. Politicians taking over the curriculum is a crisis response that became dogma. Education has crashed in the inner cities. Kids can't wait to leave. The political parties have not provided any alternative education (mine cam through Socialist Worker; where are the greens in this?). The only place you get to learn how things work is in the gangs. They are the schools of the poor here as they have been in the states since the 1930s. And as Brecht already knew, there's little difference between the conduct of gangs and the conduct of political parties – except the latter have abandoned any attempt to be political, educational or socially relevant.

As Black Audio had it in Handsworth Songs, "There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories'

I want to blame the consumerist capital and dead political culture, but blame is only the beginning of comprehension. The event sof the last few nights were not the same as 1981, as everyone says. Nor are they exclusively 'criminal', 'sick' and the other vile epithets of the politicians. There was real anger, which is political because it is not about the personal ethics and legal standing that the politicians want to finger: It is about the pubic spaces handed over to retail chains dangling their cheap goods in front of the poor. It is about refusing the grotesque policies that promote zero growth in the interests of paying off bankers. Of course this is not articulated: the means for articulating it have been meticulously denied to the angry poor. Those who might be able to articulate have been equally meticulously marginalised and ridiculed.

This is why this is NOT the time for action. Now is the time for talk.

On the positive side, great to see the youth out on the streets on bicycles