jane dark's sugarhigh!

maps are pictures of money and the state

Even economists able in some regard to have seen the crisis with a clear eye are still largely compelled to speak of it in almost purely cyclical terms — not in the sense of some autonomous motion, but rather with the presumption of some quasi-sinoidal return. We were up and now we're down and how will we go back to up? This manifests itself in Roubini's incessant return to the question of exactly when the slump will end (perhaps this is inevitable, given that he has been cast as Nostradamus rather than Chanakya), or in Krugman's scientistic worrying of the necessary repairs (one pictures him always with a thought bubble containing not his own words but Keynes's: "we have magneto trouble").

It is tempting to assert that this waveform horizon results from being adrift on the neoclassical sea; had they their feet planted in the critique of political economy, they would see the drive of the world capital system toward terminal crisis. But this too may be a mistake, albeit one of scale rather than simplicity. The inability to think the crisis in relation to geopolitics and state power afflicts various Marxian analysts as surely as it does the doyens of the core institutions. That there will not be a recovery in the full sense is explicable only through the coordination of economic and state power, and indeed the horizon of knowability here is not that of an unforeseeable economic unfolding but the difficulty in conceiving of what form the transfer of global power away from the U.S. will take.

So, resolved: this year's study project will take that as one of its necessities. We start in general agreement with Luxemburg's insistence on the role of empire in maintaining capital expansion. We disagree only insofar as she suggests that its role is to reinsert jolts of primitive accumulation to the process, while we would suggest that in the case of global empires, it has served in ways at once more nuanced and more gross to assure the future likelihood of increase in formal and real subsumption, a future commodity realized as present money through the mechanisms of credit. That this state/economic mechanism ends as well in crisis there is no doubt; the unfolding of the crisis, and the possibility of participating in it, depends from this conception.

And so the year begins. We will be posting about matters various; in the Spring, we will also begin our project of serializing portions of the music book hereabouts, for Don and others who would prefer not to read through this tawdry politicking.

40) "Warwick Avenue," Duffy
39) "Kristofferson," Tim McGraw. Does this mean Kris Kristofferson has to make a song called “Taylor Swift”?
38) "Low" (Feat. T-Pain), Flo-Rida. We got v. v. tired of this song, but the numbers don’t lie. They’re like hips that way.
37) "All Summer Long," Kid Rock. The strangest song of the year. Listen, there are plenty of songs that steal a phrase or a lick and don’t mention it, cf. “Hell Yeah.” And there are plenty that steal a lick and make a big deal of it, like Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long,” which manages to stick its nose in both “Southern Man” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” But has there ever been another song that steals two riffs — which basically contribute the entirety of the musical track between them — and mentions one, but not the other? That’s exactly what happens here: our man Bob Ritchie can’t stop remembering “Sweet Home Alabama” but (in a very odd coincidence) completely forgets the fact that his song’s main progression, rhythm and instrumentation come from a totally different song which just happens to resemble the Skynyrd classic but is by, wouldn’t you know it, Warren Zevon: “Werewolves of London.” The whole thing is just beyond weird. And why does it have to be 1989?
36) "Let Me Think About It (remix)," Ida Corr. And meanwhile, I’m stilllllll thinking.
35) "Come On Over," Jessica Simpson
34) "Going Down to Cuba," Jackson Browne. What is the most tawdry thing about this song? That it’s topical? Liberal? Topical and liberal? Is there in fact anything worse that this: “Maybe I’ll go through Mexico, old Jesse Helms don’t have to know; anyway all the allies of the USA travel to Cuba everyday”? It’s enough to make you want to kill yourself or go back in time and vote for McCain. But insipid and clumsy quatrains are a dime a dozen, you know? Lovely ones are few and far between. And so Warren Zevon’s best producer gets us about four minutes in: “I’m gonna drink the Ron Anejo (no no the mojito)…and walk out on the Malecón — in one hand a monte cristo and in the other an ice cream cone.” Shoulda always been that way.
33) "Don't You Know You're Beautiful," Kellie Pickler. “Kellie? It’s some guy on the phone. He says he’s Martina McBride’s lawyer?”
32) "Breakfast In Bed," Shelby Lynne. There’s something funny about doing a Dusty Springfield covers album. That something is that a lot of Dusty Springfield’s songs were already covers.
31) "Love Don't Live Here," Lady Antebellum. This shares DNA with so many other songs it would be pointless to name them — oops, Hal Ketchum’s “Hearts Are Gonna Roll” — but this doesn’t make it one tine bit less pleasing. You don’t have to make it new, you have to make it good. Which ain’t easy.

30) “16th Avenue,” Sunny Sweeney. Both better and worse than the original. Lacy J. Dalton can’t really sing, but boy did she figure out what to do about that. This version is just…pretty, plus it’s a near-perfect song. Around here we do not turn our noses up at that.
29) “Bleeding Love” & “Better in Time,” Leona Lewis. Platinum voice, X Factor champion, robo-star, etc etc: All more or less irrelevant. Leona Lewis was called into being by Mariah Carey’s abandonment of her early pop stylings, and by nothing else. Lewis basically provides followups to “Dreamlover” and “Vision of Love,” sequels which arrive so late that they can only be about recovering from the pain of those earlier loves. Indeed, Leona Lewis’s entire had love, threw it away, was in wilderness, confronted my mistake, am now beginning to recover schtick is in fact a narration of Mariah’s career and its relation to her initial style: you just have to replace the word “love” with “huge smash hits.” This works pretty well as a general shorthand in pop music.
28) “Blur,” Britney Spears. The eccentrically phased, wobbly and betimes vaguely Middle Eastern sound with distantly pretty melody calls back to JT’s “What Goes Around” — both of which feature production work by Danja, though Timbaland’s work on the earlier song makes it a few notches better (last year's Number Five). But there is herein an awfully hinky calculation, insofar as this song meant to summon up the spectre of Dick In A Box Office Gold at the same time conjures he matter of date rape. All of which is to say, if this song doesn’t appear on an episode of Gossip Girl in the New Year (“What Goes Around” made the pilot), Britney will be pissed. And you don’t want that.
27) “Speakerphone,” Kylie Minogue. Here we offer only the most minimal meditation on the secret relationship between speakerphone and Auto-Tune, that euphonious pair of technologies both based around the electronic flattening of sounds toward a programmed mean: well, as no one has yet noted about Auto-Tune, isn’t that the very effect of the Top 40 in the first place, and ever was?
26) "Start A Band," Brad Paisley & Keith Urban. There is much to say about this good-natured bit of fluff by country superstars with fake-sounding real names. Couldn’t “Urban Paisley” be a whole new musical style (not in evidence here)? Couldn’t “Paisley Urban” be a good name for a character on Gossip Girl? But the main point here, we believe, is that this particular song, in which the virtues of becoming a rocker are extolled over the shredding of denims and dual guitars, and said virtues are indeed proffered as wisdom by “my sister’s rock star boyfriend”…well, these songs used to be rock songs by rock bands, did they not? This issue will return, especially when we reach Number One on the countdown.
25) “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It),” Beyoncé
24) “Cleaning This Gun,” Rodney Adkins. In the rare year in which Toby Keith’s album has little to recommend it, a space opens for jocular assholes of lesser stature.
23) “All I Want To Do,” Sugarland
22) “Around The Bend,” The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Surely it’s a bit hard to believe that the last remaining music store in my town has sections for happy hardcore, bleep, and “vocal,” but still lacks a section for "Apple Commercials," which is perhaps the only profitable genre to arise in the last couple of years.
21) “Paralyzer,” Finger Eleven. Charted in ’07, Gossip Girl soundtrack in ’08, radio play to this present moment. This song’s singular achievement is to show the musicological link between Franz Ferdinand and Led Zeppelin, which is not easy and which it does with unpleasant clarity.

20) “Chicken Fried,” Zac Brown Band
19) “Change,” Taylor Swift. This is the least “country” sounding song on the solid front-to-back album, and hence finds itself stuck in last-track-ville. It’ll be a hit single anyway, in part because it declares young Taylor’s willingness to be the next Shania Twain (which is not the worst idea, given the immensity of her charm and the timbre of her voice), and in part because it does an excellent job with the minigenre of the perfectly contentless rebel song, geared to the vast audience that knows it’s supposed to to be rebelling against something but isn’t quite sure what: “…because these things will change” she says, “can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down. It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win.” It’s never once stated what things are at stake, or who the us and the them are; rather it hails its audience unerringly by not specifying anything further than “They might be bigger but we’re faster and we’re never scared.” Tweens, and Democrats: it’s really an ideal song for the Inauguration. You know: change, revolution. In the video, when she hits the chorus and throws an almost-fist in the air, she looks far from small and agile: a skinny white radio tower.
18) “A Milli,” Lil Wayne. See comment on Number One (forthcoming).
17) “Discipline,” Nine Inch Nails. This band has now been making good songs, albeit few and far between, for 19 years. By way of comparison, the Beatles made good songs for 8 years, and the Rolling Stones for 16 if one includes Tattoo You.
16) “No Air,” Jordin Sparks feat. Chris Brown. Yeah, but where’s Kelly Clarkson? No, seriously, is she in Simon Cowell’s basement or something?
15) “Go Hard Or Go Home,” E-40 feat. The Federation. Plucked from one of ‘06’s top albums and dropped onto an ’07 soundtrack to become a single in ’08 and make the case for the lesser-know DJ Wes as heir to Rick Rock’s hyphy throne, it was all we had in advance of the new 40 Water album which was due out in November and just…vanished.
12-14) “Sorry,” Buckcherry; “Love Remains The Same,” Gavin Rossdale; “We Don't Have To Look Back Now,” Puddle Of Mudd. As we have argued elsewhere, all rock genres end in the power ballad. What we missed is that, after the power ballad, there is the just-plain-ballad, all that’s left of the great white hope of the Nineties, glam, grunge, modrock. There is no aesthetic distance between these songs and, say, Xtina’s “Beautiful,” except they’re not quite as good. But what is?
11) “What Kind of Gone,” Chris Cagle. If the bridge really began “is it the kind of gone where she’s atom bombs, coolin’ down she’ll come around,” as we believed for about a week, it woulda cracked the Top Ten.

10) “I’m Me,” Lil Wayne. See comment on Number One (forthcoming).
9) “Party People,” Nelly feat. Fergie. Nelly and Fergie are exactly the same kind of talent, with the same ferocious desire to be down, despite being Vegas to the depths of their immortal souls. They should make many many songs together.
8) “Sounds So Good,” Ashton Shepherd. She keeps getting called a “classicist,” which is almost always a curious category, indicating an appeal to some canonical-but-lost value. But which one? The sound is scarcely a throwback to Lynn or Cline, Parton or Judd, or even Reba, for that matter. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that Shepherd is Gretchen Wilson if Gretchen Wilson could sing and wasn’t so proud of herself for her faux-militance and camouflage bikinis. It’s still hard to believe we had to take that humorlessly ludicrous shit seriously, but if Ashton Shepherd is the recompense, maybe it was worth it.
7) “That Song In My Head,” Julianne Hough. Apparently she is a very good dancer. She is not a remarkable singer, but this song is so well-written that even a mediocre dancer could have charted with it; Hough goes after it with her best Deana Carter circa “We Danced Anyway,” and it’s plenty good enough.
6) “Hot 'N Cold,” Katy Perry. Well, after years of top songs by extraordinarily unlikeable and heinous guys, I suppose the gals deserve a turn or two thousand. As a footnote, a notable moment of 2008: “I Kissed a Girl” hits number one the same week that gay marriage is (briefly) legalized in California. Katy Perry should forced to donate a thousand hours of public service getting Proposition 8 overturned. So should Lil Wayne.
5) “Get Back,” Demi Lovato. The thing to understand about Pink and Avril Lavigne is that their self-positioning-via-insult-of-bubblegum-divas schtick is not simply disingenuous unto hypocrisy (as our man Alexander notes gently here). What Pink and Avril ignore most significantly is that they are all part of a singular process, the great peristaltic motion of the biz. They are working for their supposed antagonists, working for the industry as a whole to open up new markets for Disney pop. Their historic mission is to make the world safe for Demi Lovato to make songs considerably better than theirs, and indeed to make the best “rock” song of the year; Demi is possible not despite but because of Pink and Avril, bad faith and all.
4) “Fascination,” Alphabeat. A little Katrina and the Waves, a little Cure, hmm, David Bowie’s young dudes but not quite all of them, a little Human League plus Animotion plus Roxette and, as one site has it just right, “Gay or Europop?” Already dropped from their major label, 12/20/2008. Uh-oh.
3) “Rocks In Your Shoes,” Emily West. Boy howdy did this song go nowhere. Thumbnail theory: it’s too well-written.
2) “Untouchable,” Taylor Swift. The original, by Luna Halo, is the kind of machinically angular mess that has one foot in jackass Red Hot Chili Peppers and another in the neo-new-wave dance rock that fell like a pestilence on the land shortly after the millennium. In short, "Untouchable" is in the first instance perhaps the most awful song one could imagine on short notice. This cover, conversely, is patient, delicate, and implacably beautiful, which gives one pause about what musical genius might be.

1) “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.; “Paper Planes” (Diplo Street Remix feat. Bun B & Rich Boy); “Paper Planes” (DFA Remix)”; “Straight to Hell,” The Clash; “Swagga Like Us,” T.I. and Jay-Z (feat. Jay-Z and Lil Wayne)

First things first: from an ’07 album, “Paper Planes” strikes us overwhelmingly as the song of 2008, and not at all because it seemed to haunt every third film soundtrack, and not especially because the "Homeland Security Remixes" were released this year with their sequence of astonishing versions, each of which reorients the song in its own way and still fails to elude the song’s massive, centerless gravity. It is the song of 2008 because it was good to listen to during the peak of the financial crisis. It is the song of 2008 because its sheer presence — not its subject, but its circulation — was both symptom and diagnosis of the situation. It is the song of 2008 mostly because the song in one form or another became improbably ubiquitous and then some, moving a million digital downloads, crossing demographics, reaching the bourgeois and rocking the boulevard. It wasn’t as popular in absolute numbers as any number of songs, but its relative popularity reverberated as a mysterious surplus. And that surplus, the condition of possibility for "Paper Planes" to exceed itself, is the surplus of 2008: a surplus of misery, of the awareness of misery, of the awareness of misery as an outcome of inevitable systemic fuckage, and of the dawning awareness that it must change. This is the moment of optimism is that otherwise dread-laced toomuchness wound sinuously through public space in a song whose hook was a semiautomatic and a cash register blent together into a single motion, the coordination of power that scales to every level — and who could decide if that sound was the corner or the world, Bun B and Rich Boy’s scrapey game or DFA's digitized assay of impersonal, imperial force? Both, duh — it was about how collusion, coercion, shake-ya-ass synchronization get solicited at every stratum, for better and mostly for worse.

Let’s call it hegemony funk.

The song was local-global all by itself, that’s the thing. In that sense it is at once a splendid ambassador for Kala but is at the same time not of it — the album depends on each song being a partial moment and motion in the album’s larger circulation, its situation, and “Paper Planes” works all by its lonesome: a failed song, a great single. This results in real critical problems, as it happens. For example: there are several great moments in “Paper Planes”: my favorite is the moment in which Maya sings, in her inimitable sing-song, “sum-sum-summer-summer…” chirpy and upbeat, echoing a million other pop odes to summertime, somewhere amidst The Jamies’ “Summertime Summertime,” The Cars’ “Summer,” and maybe T-Squad’s “No Sleep Til Summertime.” And then she finishes the phrase and you realize she was saying something else all along, “some some some are some are murdered, some are some are let go” and that the song has just whipped you around the sharpest turn a piece of music can make, delight/death, pop/polemic, and that every moment of this song is just as extraordinarily thought out….and as we said this is a real critical problem, because to identify M.I.A. by moments is to get it wrong, she is the only person making records that matter, not even albums but systems, structures — the album is dead, that’s for sure, and it has to get smaller like singles or bigger like the world picture. This is the intensifying logic of the local-global, of the patch of history we are watching burn, and not much music has been up to the challenge, not much has succeeded at both reaches. Maybe only her.

The Oughts will surely be discussed as music’s balkan decade, when the center of the industry could not hold, and microgenres and distributed communities imagined and mapped onto each other — and that story won’t exactly be wrong. But it will be missing some crucial shit. For one thing, this claim is probably more significantly true about the Nineties. The Eighties consolidated themselves under the rule of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and for a hot minute it looked like the Nineties would form an ellipse around the foci of Kurt and Dre, but both of them biffed it in their own ways and it was about then that the Modern Balkanized Era began. But that story, a little bit right, is wrong too — or, rather, it’s true from a particular position which still, to this day, does a pretty decent job of passing itself off as no position at all, just common sense. In fact, and we guess this is the point if there is a point, the story of decline and disintegration since 1994 is not the story of pop music in general but pretty much the story of rock. For of course the counterstory of hip-hop’s increasing permeation, coordination and domination of the Western market is equally true, and the mutations within hip-hop proper are massive and astonishing and nothing compared to the mutations within r’n’b, soul, rock, teenpop et al to adapt themselves so they could breathe in hip-hop’s atmosphere. What mostly retained its own genealogy was, clearly enough, country, which continued somehow not to be “pop music” (perhaps for this very reason). As a result, much of what had come to characterize rock had no choice but to flee into country, not the least of which would be the guitar solo, the long melody line, the sing along chorus, ripped jeans, and the narrative of starting a band. Country hasn’t become rock, as some like to say by way of explaining to themselves why they are willing to discuss country now; it has absorbed that part of rock that hip-hop didn’t. And so the last thing we mean to say is that the last decade of what gets bracketed under “pop” has seen titans, less than a handful but that’s about right, and not a one of them is white. And but maybe for Timbaland (and he remains a strange case, since the charisma of the performer remains real when we are talking about “mattering” in this social sense) you can find them all on a single song from 2008. None of them are named T.I.

Indeed, by now we can all probably admit that T.I. is third-tier at best, struggling to keep pace with Slim Thug and Keak da Sneak. Thus he stands out like a sour thumb on what is basically his own song, “Swagga Like Us.” Sugarhigh! has never much liked Kanye — for all his track appeal, we prefer writers who can write and rappers who can rap — but the shadow he has cast over the short millennium, well, one ignores it at one’s peril, and Mr. West deserves a little swagger. And yet. There are probably only three pop stars who can legitimately look back on the last decade and declare “No one on the corner has swagger like us,” and two of them are Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, for all the former’s lost glory and the latter’s allergy to the studio system. Finally T.I.’s absurd keyboard pomp made sense as something more than the survival of Procol Harum as a darker shade of pale: coronation music for the last kings standing. So: Jay and Weezy peer out from “Swagga Like Us,” astride the decade like the twin collosi of Memnon, but they don’t open the song, or close it down, or provide the hook. No, natch, that duty falls to M.I.A., sampled from “Paper Planes,” because "Swagga Like Us" — more or less a failure but at the same time very close to being the truth of the last ten years — would have no claim on the truth without her.

If the average life expectancy were around 130 years instead of around 70, "the century" would cease to be a particularly interesting category.

Adam Kotsko is ahead of me in teasing out the somewhat predictable dismissal of Soderbergh's Che found in the Gray Goose. As Adam notes,

Scott claims that we need a “moral reckoning” on Guevara. Yet do we really lack for skeptical commentary on the Cuban revolution and left-wing revolutionary activities in general in the US? Hasn’t mainstream opinion settled on the conclusion — or rather, the a priori assumption — that, whatever Guevara’s intentions, the Cuban revolution was bad on the whole? This is what political correctness really looks like: dismissing any position outside the mainstream as somehow naive or dishonest, forbidding directors from being sympathetic or identifying with certain types of subjects.

Che represented, to Sartre and others, and perhaps to himself, a new kind of person, a creature of pure revolutionary integrity free of the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity. Those trappings, of course, are part of what make characters in movies interesting. In honoring the myth of Che as a kind of macho Marxist superman in whom thought and feeling, action and theory, passion and discipline are united, Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Del Toro (a producer of the picture as well as its star) remove him from the realm of ordinary human sympathy.

Shouldn't one lose one's license for that? Is it any less tawdry than conceding you don't like any art that isn't pro-government — or for that matter refuse any art that doesn't present the proletariat as the seat of virtue and strength? Or, in perhaps the most pitiable, defensible case, tantamount to saying "I only get movies about people like me"? Surely there is no greater idiocy imaginable. One is humbled to live in a world with such titans.

Over at the suddenly and excellently renascent Ads Without Products, the suddenly and excellently erstwhile CR has been making a vital record of the guilty half-repressed flowering of nationalization talk in the national discourse — patiently noting that while the measures discussed are always simultaneously disavowed, and not really full-nationalization (much less socialism), it remains the case that

...every time they dress the windows with this sort of talk, every time the government players offer the argument that General Motors or Chrysler would have been better managed by responsible, sane, and forward-thinking bureaucrats rather than their board and corporate management, they turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click toward state management and the economics of planning....Talk like this, however cynically deployed, was absolutely unimaginable a few months ago. Of course the chatterers on television and the papers will forget all about these arguments when (if!) things improve. But the voters, an ever larger percentage of whom are about to become unemployed, perhaps won’t if they are startled into attention by the shock of what’s coming in the next few months and years.

Now of course, because this is CR we are talking about, his suggestion is far more attentive and nuanced — it also has the virtue of referring to an actual process (economic restructuring) rather than mere campaign rhetoric. Nonetheless, we fear one could make what is, in effect, a quite contrary claim. Yes, there is a hysterical leap from "nationalization" to "socialism," and it ain't CR's. But one might be leery of that hysteria — which is, after all, indicative of an already-existing delusion, not a rising understanding — as being any kind of indication of what is suddenly imaginable. And if there is a "new" thought here, it might be quite different.

After all, the 20th century has (at least) two clear traditions of a centralized and planned economy. One is what our patriots call socialism. The other is (tellingly) ever more forgotten and ever more with us, which is something like Alfredo Rocco's (and later Mussolini's) corporatism, which can be recognized in mutations of the developmental state such as Singapore or South Korea. And it strikes us that, of these "two nationalizations," it is the latter that we are swerving toward. Tellingly, Russia's spasm of nationalizations simply makes evident that the Soviet Union's final economic form wasn't communism at all, for there is no return to worker ownership or anything of the sort, but a reversal of their own disastrous neoliberal adventure, state-made oligarchy retooling for global hard times.

One way of describing what has happened in the US is this. Thirtyfive years ago, the state more or less decided to let capital go off its meds and to concentrate on its duties as bodyguard instead. Eventually, capital got too nutty to function, doing extraordinary damage to human lives en route (as well as to the environment where those lives expire, obviously enough). So now the state has stepped in to rescue capitalism — this is the historic mission of the new President and his old economic team — by returning it to a healthier regimen. Because it turns out, just as promised, that capitalism isn't in fact capable of "healthy" self-medication. In the face of a contraction toward a no-growth economy, corporatist state planning is merely necessary. And, to repeat, this is what we talk about when we talk about nationalization, of late.

So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of socialist possibilities into the national discourse, but their further erasure. Every time that we agree that the word "socialism" might refer to something other than, at a minimum, worker ownership if not indeed the end of surplus value extraction; every time that we misrecognize state corporatism as something other than a moment in capital's "equilibrium in motion," we "turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click" away from socialism. We forget what that word promises. Perhaps the most optimistic memory, as Jasper reminded us, is that the corporatist regimes have arisen historically in the fact of popular socialist challenges — but that in no way guarantees the motion will summon forth such a movement via some blind mechanism of counterweights.

To change metaphors: we stand with CR and many others in identifying this as a moment when the chinks in capital's armor are visible. But this talk of nationalization, this strategy of planning, is an attempt to anneal the fissure in capital's domination, not to open it wide. It serves as the sign of an opportunity, but is not itself in any way opportune.

NINJAs vs. Pirates as the truth of the world system.

Or, can the subalt-A speak?

From "Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control":

There is absolutely no reformist government anywhere in the world that can deal with the serious and major issues of urban inequality, because it will not take on property values, land inflation etc. Until you start talking about confiscating the incriminating land value or socialising land or systems of limited equity in land, you cannot control the city, you cannot achieve any real equality in it.

Is M-C-M' a narrative motion? The answer to this question is not at all as apparent as it may first appear.

One might answer in the affirmative by rehearsing Lukács' Theory of the Novel, in which the return of the individual to the social whole after his bildung narrativizes M-C-M' (though the book is written before his Marxist turn and does not frame things in this manner). The Lukácsian model narrative, however, is more properly analogous to an Althusserian reproduction of the relations of production. Thus at best one can argue that modern narrative shows the preconditions for capital's self-valorization.

Conversely, M-C-M' character as at once change and not-change might seem to defy the category of narrative. After all, it is not clear that change is itself narrative (as in the case where the same "change" is repeated ritualistically and reset so as to be repeated again). Certainly motion isn't intrinsically narrative. Is increase narrative? Or is such a belief itself entirely ideological? Moreover, Debord's account of "frozen history" (itself routed through Lukács) suggests that M-C-M' is fundamentally anti-narrative, much as Marx suggests that history begins when the M-C-M' cycle comes to an end.

It may be that the best one might propose is that narrative is an imperfectly-wrought mechanism for inspecting the lifeworld of M-C-M', as well as being in its contemporary form one of the formula's many effects.

• as 2046 makes clear, hotels are the hookers of the housing market.
• war hawks, technocrats of neoliberalism, or both. Shocked — shocked — by Obama's stern move to the right post-election. Didn't see that coming at all.
• "At the level of intention sure speculators and hedgers are different but from the perspective of what they do I'm not so certain, the distinction between speculation and hedging might be specious; people just like to talk about speculators so they can have someone to blame, some story about causality, it's like Jews — I mean that's what the Jews are for right? as the secret causal principle of economy gone wrong — when people say speculators it's pretty much the same thing, they really mean to say Althusserian structural effectivity but for whatever reason they just can't bring themselves to say that out loud or even to themselves."
• there ought to be a law against history.
• wait, where is the money for the stimulus package coming from again?

There can rarely have been a better allegory for the melancholic misery of American electoral politics than California's Proposition Two:

The proposition would add a chapter to Division 20 of the California Health and Safety Code to prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.

I am just a bit leery of the category of empathy for animals, not because I think it's misbegotten but because the imagination that animals have "thoughts" or "feelings" which are analogous to those of humans leads to all kinds of mistakes; every time someone tells me why it's okay to train animals to do stuff, or to sit on top of horses, they make some kind of appeal to the animal's inner nature, and what it wants and what its idea of a good life is, that isn't finally persuasive. That said, if you are determined to vote, vote yes on 2 (and no on 8).

Then weep, if you have any empathy at all. What you will have just voted for is this: that animals, which have no real protection from the power of humans, should be granted some nominal degree of "freedom" and "dignity" which involves, in short, a few inches of mobility in the relatively brief period before they and/or their offspring are destroyed and consumed by profit. No debate on the latter point. What their lives are for, we shall not consider, for that has been long ago decided. Salve your conscience thusly: that the strong should by all means continue to prey on the weak, but that certain relatively minuscule palliatives should be proffered during the productive process. Palliatives which are surely real, and which just as surely sanctify the larger process, and the predation of the owners upon the caged and the crated.

And then vote for a president. For better cages and crates. Call this "progressive," even call it "left." Sanctify, sanctify.

Surely much of Alain Badiou's essay "Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle?" (generously translated into english by Infinite and Savonarola) is salutary, and its conclusion only moreso:

Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action.

The main analytic involves in essence the collapsing of two Jamesonian formulations — that of "the real of history," and the epigrammatic "history is what hurts" — into a single, sharp point: the real is what hurts. Not the "real economy," not the spectacle of financial meltdown, but actual human misery which exists in contrast to fictitious capital and mendacious reportage. It would be tempting to describe the essay as "Jameson without political economy" (sometimes called "philosophy") — except for Badiou's gesture in that direction, so unfamiliar as to provoke Infinite's exclamation: "Badiou on mortgages! Who'd have thought it?" In short, one small measure of the crisis is this: it is spectacular enough to seduce even the set theorists into talking securitization, if only to dismiss it. And it must be remarked: Badiou treats the specifics well, choosing a select few and offering them up incisively without sacrificing his demands on the pyre of the technicians.

Let us start with what he gets right. Badiou notes that financialization is scarcely a new fact. And he adds, with even more justification, that there is no division between the speculative and "real" economy, and finally no such thing as "fictitious value" — a term which provides as much coverage to bankers as it does insult, since it proposes falsely that the financial processes are somehow isolated from exploitation in the production processes. And so he proposes, again compellingly, that "the return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad "irrational" speculation back to healthy production." Instead, it must be "the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world."

Now let us attend to what he gets wrong. He errs by ignoring the mutations of financial capital in the last 35 years, and their relation to the specific development of a world political dynamic. Which is to say that, while understanding the relation of the speculative and real economies, he fails to insist on the conjoining of finance space and political space. And this points up his classically Badiouvian horizon: even when gesturing toward economic facts, he cannot read the relation between political economy and the state.

Further, he can't read the relation between the political economy and the real. He treats the spectacle as an independent object projected to distract the audience from the real. This is more or less the antithesis of how Debord presents the spectacle, which is as anything but a diversion, a made object, a thing. "One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced." And, more specifically elsewhere: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." Perhaps Badiou had in mind Regis Debray's mediatisation, or Baudrillard's simulation. But the spectacle does not replace nor distract from the real; it is an expression of real conditions, produced by the developmental logic of capital and its forms of exchange. The social sphere may no more look away from the spectacle than I may look away from my own mind. There is no choice between spectacle and real; Badiou's title is nonsensical. Or, rather, it is non-dialectical. This may seem an abstract point: it had clear and absolute consequences for his analysis.

This non-dialectical thought conceives of things like state, political economy and the real as autonomous objects, only related — it would seem — by something like decisionism, as if we could simply turn away from one and toward another. This is evident in the inert presence within his argument of the autonomous concept, "immediate and reflective life" — an Archimedean position from which "one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us." It is apparently arrived at via revelation.

One can't blame Badiou for such fantasies; they are a survival strategy. Less defensible is his root economic claim, to wit: "The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis."

No it's not.

This is not to say that what has happened with housing has not been a source of actual homelessness, penury, and misery — and that this wants better attention than the hypnotic representational sway of the Dow Jones Index. And perhaps, as a generous friend argues, Badiou isn't referring to the specific housing crisis of foreclosures, but taking the opportunity to remind us of the ongoing global immiseration of the homeless — in which case his argument has nothing to do with this crisis in particular, and is reasonable to the very extent that it's entirely general. But if one wants to think economically or politically about the crisis — and as everyone with a handle on the dialectic knows, these constitute a single thinking — one ought to grasp that "the real essence of the financial crisis" is a doubled crisis of credit and of hegemony.

It is important to specify what "crisis of credit" means — and what it does not mean. It does not mean that the sudden credit freeze within the financial industry; it does not mean the unavailability of commercial paper in the money markets; it does not mean the phenomenon first called "flight to safety" and then shortly amended to "flight to quality." It does not even mean panicky deleveraging, or the failure of banks and hedge funds which cannot meet margin calls. And finally it does not mean the decreasing access to consumer credit, though that's a bit closer. The crisis of credit is found in the status of the relationship between the speculative and real economies.

The relationship is in essence contractual. The speculative economy expands based on the extension of credit. This extension of credit is in effect a contract, and it is not vague and mysterious (despite the mysterious financial instruments that wheel about withn it). It is a contract committing the real economy to increase the intensity, magnitude, and/or duration of its exploitation of labor so as to return that real value to the economy. That promised exploitation — on which every deal in the speculative economy eventually rests — is a guarantee of misery to human lives, and it doesn't get realer.

The meltdown is the upwelling of doubt that this contract to deliver real exploitation of value sufficient to the extension of credit can be honored. We can see that this macro-level reproduces the exact form of an individual mortgage disaster (say, e.g., an option ARM mortgage), wherein things fall apart as soon as home equity value ceases to increase within an endlessly expanding market. Having seen this, one sees that the crisis is isomorphic not simply with its individual cases but with geopolitics: the grand strategy for increasing intensity, breadth and duration of labor exploitation is exactly what we call neoliberalism. Thus the crisis of credit, wherein the promise to increase exploitation is no longer believed, is not just isomorphic to, but merely a different phrasing for, a crisis of hegemony. They are the same scheme to command and harvest a single space which is at once political and economic. Economics and the state are explicitly, absolutely and dialectically intertwined through the marriage of credit and hegemony in the modern era. This can be seen in the notion through which other nations and sovereign wealth funds purchase American paper to secure the protection of the U.S. military in our role as global cop, while the U.S. in turn funds its geopolitical force with such revenues.

But this is ending. That is the global truth of the crisis. The US-led interstate system, in conjunction with current transnational corporate forms, can no longer compel a belief in its own endless extensibility. Not even when Condoleeza Rice sneaks onto the television during the early peak of the meltdown to rattle sabers in Russia's direction — as if she could click together her famous heels while chanting hegemony hegemony hegemony and transport herself to the familiar comforts of home. Alas. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Washington Consensus anymore.

We can now dispense entirely with Badiou; even accepting his definition of the real as the immiseration of the impoverished and exploited and displaced (and who but the most churlish of ideologists would refute that?) it's clear that the geoeconomic crisis is in no way exterior to such miseries. The crisis of credit/hegemony (or cregemony) is tied deeply and absolutely to the real and its fate, and to think these matters means to think political economy and geopolitics, and to think them together.

Without diverting attention from local effects (and I must say, the suddenly popular deployment of the term schadenfreude to indicate all feelings other than tender humanist concern is an impoverished account indeed of the affective lives engendered by capital), this systemic and historical crisis wants equivalent thought. I would argue that this is an occasion where revolutionary thought is not just possible but necessary, according to history itself.

Arrighi describes the successive cycles of world-system hegemony as each expanding on the previous in ways that are both quantitative and qualitative. One notes, at the same time, that pivotal revolutionary moments within the world-system have had three characteristics, which Yeats understood perfectly well when he wrote "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (funny how poetry was once empowered to confront these matters). One: they happen during moments of exchange between hegemonic centers: the American, French, Haitian et al revolutions taking place during the transition from the Dutch to British empires; the Russian Revolution during the overlap between British and United States world regimes. Two: they happen not within the hegemonic exchange, but off to the side. Three: they increase in aggregate scale and organizational complexity, just as the empires do. All of which is to say that such revolutionary moments have a tendency to appear in a time and place where the struggle is not successfully magnetized by a singular hegemonic force, with a magnitude related to the magnitude of the world-system itself.

Or to rephrase the matter slightly: South America. It is, after all, there that the fading of U.S. geoeconomic hegemony has been most visible, as the capacity to enforce neoliberal economic restructurings via the IMF/World Bank nexus becomes a memory. Of course the political and economic shifts on the continent have been very much along the lines of three steps forward, two steps back in the last forty years, as has been well-summarized here. In part this is endogenous to the continental situation, with its differences in history, language, resources. However, this should be understood not as an impossible horizon but as an inevitable consequence of the broadening field of action, per element three above: a tenuous, only half-coordinated continental revolution. Two more evident horizons present themselves.

One is that it is hard to conceive of what form this current transition will take. It is unlikely to appear as a "world war"; unlikelier still as some sort of direct handover, as in the current fantasia, in which everyone wakes up one day and says in unison, "All hail China!" That this hegemonic exchange will be slow and unfamiliar, a mutation that doesn't accord with the world-picture fostered by the Westphalian interstate system, does not mean that it isn't happening nonetheless.

In the shorter run, the economic crisis will surely manifest itself in horrifying ways in Latin America itself, in ways that inhibit any kind of Mercosur solidarity — structural debt remains, even if the Chicago/Bretton Woods mandate has lost its premillennial charisma. This will be a real site of struggle, both economic and perhaps military. The reformulation of credit/debt relations between Norte and Sur, which exists in inextricable concert with the real housing crisis, is also a condition of possibility for the real revolutionary moment we are already in.

Given that the movie industry has played a significant role in the era of U.S. hegemony, both as economic engine and ideological chassis, it should surprise no one that it turns now to speak of that era's end. Perhaps — no, certainly —  that is the import of not one but two films being released in swift succession on the life of Che Guevara, the spectral embodiment of a unified revolutionary Latin America: films that are at once apparitions of the spectacle and expressions of the real.

A brand of progressivism soothes itself by making reference to “apocalyptic Marxism”; this seems little more than weak comedy, as when an acquaintance stumbles up to you at a party, eyes glazed, to slur, Oh my god you are so wasted. But of course we must recognize the moment of truth in such a projection. The phrase “apocalyptic Marxism” is merely capital’s admission that the end of the current arrangement of private property, and of extracting value from human bodies, would indeed be annihilation of all. The capitalist is entirely identified with surplus value; when it dies, the world dies with it.

In realityland it is capitalism that is apocalyptic; so says the news every quarter of an hour. This is internal to the logic of capitalism itself, and particularly finance capital; even the closest camp followers of money cannot produce any external reason for this disaster. The two core characteristics of finance capital, correlation and credit, tend irrevocably toward this apocalyptic situation. Correlation is the situation produced by the need for increasingly rapid and voluminous transfers throughout the financial network; credit, what is transferred. Profits are made by balancing local risks, and then striking at increasingly slighter and briefer differentials. The strikes must therefore be delivered with ever-greater force. So there must be ever more channels and ever more liquidity to pour through them. Thus the rise in the extension of “leverage” — the ratio of borrowed to held assets — is not a “failure of fundamentals” but an absolute inevitability of finance capital. Correspondingly, because of these channels, an illness in one sector is increasingly likely to express itself as contagion systemwide. And because states as well as financial institutions are imbricated in correlation — this is the import of the phrase “too big to fail” — systemic risk is not just fiscal but global and political. One can even buy insurance against this eventuality, insurance against the end of the world, to improve one's bond rating as one sells dubious derivatives on to the next station.

The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm — around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt — for the insurance to be paid out. (Mackenzie here)

Another way to describe the relation between correlation and credit, alongside channels and liquidity, is that between circulation and production. The credit has to be credit against something. It is a series of guarantees made and believed, stacked one atop the other like turtles. Even wagers that certain promises won’t be kept — insurance, credit default swaps, etc — are not external stabilizing forces on this stack of turtle; they're internal to the operation of the financial system. They too are part of the series of guarantees. They too have to be believed. And something has to produce this belief.

That is to say, it is not turtles all the way down (Buddhism is an opiate too). The bottom turtle rests on the production floor: the “real economy” where people go to work, make stuff, are paid wages minus surplus value, and in turn purchase stuff. The problem, from the perspective of financial capital, is that the value generated in that process can no longer keep up with the accelerating needs generated by financial competition: derivatives trading now far outpaces the commodity economy. And so, at the point where production floor and the stack of turtles meet, consumer credit becomes the pivotal guarantee: the promise that the real economy of the future, and of new and distant lands, will be paid into the ongoing apparatus — and thus can be spent now, guaranteeing all the other guarantees above it. Consumer credit is the bottom turtle. It’s a balloon turtle, really, that needs to be continually inflated; we call these “credit bubbles.”

It is clear enough that this abstract situation dominated by a single, endlessly expanding, relentlessly interconnected aggregation of corporations and states premised on the increasing internalization of labor across space and time is nothing but the financial expression of the concept of globalization, of neoliberalism itself. This is a point that Jasper is making here. And it thusly is clear that the attempt to “rescue” the financial sector is an attempt to rescue the neoliberal project.

There is perhaps something to be gained from recognizing the bailout as yet another credit bubble: money from future work to be made available now, but this time without even the choice to take out a mortgage or take home a flatscreen TV. When people keep asking “where will the money come from” they are simply asking about this problem, about the relation of circulation to production. For the bailout to work, one has to believe in the first place that the real economy can and will pay out such a figure in addition to its other requirements, in the future and in distant as-yet-unincorporated lands.

In the penthouse of the bailout debate, however, the central question seems to concern which turtle to inflate. And so even the most “liberal” economists simply suggest it will work better if we treat a lower turtle. Pure liquidity, at the head of the top turtle? A turtle slightly lower in the pile, like a stratum of financial corporations? Small business turtles? The lowest turtle of consumer credit and consumer demand? This set of choices is called “the political spectrum.”

None of this can answer the question about what will be made, sold, purchased within the real economy as it is abstractly mortgaged against this present loan. More commodities, more houses? Ironically, what is on offer this month is apocalypse itself. Or rather, safety from it. We are getting nothing for 700 billion but promised protection against the threat of systemic failure, a threat issued hour by hour on the news, by politicians and economists. We are made to purchase the very insurance Mackenzie discusses, but may sell nothing onward. Apocalypse is merely capitalism’s last new line, the latest in use value, though we are compelled always to imagine that it comes from somewhere else, is someone else’s idea…

Don't want an "apology from Wall Street," don't even need punitive compensation for executives. These are what will be given over as sacrifices in return for retaining the veil over the theological concept of ownership on which capital depends. The axis of revenge is the weakest form of opposition. Today's only pragmatic slogan: equity or barbarism.

One thing the Paulson bailout scheme makes apparent is the indivisibility, in late capitalism, of primitive accumulation and real subsumption. The bailout appears as primitive accumulation: the looting of taxpayer assets to be entered into the self-valorizing circuit of capital. However, insofar as the taxpayers don't actually "have" the loot on hand, they are obligated to pay over time, via work to be done (thus they are doubly looted: both of the surplus value extracted from the general labor process in which they participate, and the concrete value of the tax burden from their diminished pay). This is a core logic of financialization; it renders real subsumption to come as primitive accumulation now.

• "Dazed Capital Feels Its Way, Eyes on Election"
• welcome to the Palindrome
• “There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises,” Mr. Bernanke told officials last week. [most insensible syllogism ever? discuss]
• defeat gardens
• "It all depends on when and where I am. In that sense I'm a man totally without prejudices, like history or the weather — completely unbiased. And since I am, I can transform into a kind of system."

In times of miracles and wonders, our thoughts turn to anthropology. And so it is that, because you can't spell TED spread without Canary Wharf, we are especially grateful to the efforts of Infinite Thøught. If anyone with their wits and camera about them cares to go down to Wall Street, sugarhigh! will be pleased to publish your findings.

...that the current climate is not ideal for teenpop to essay a comeback. It's better for belle époques.

What will be the soundtrack of capital's auto-da-fé? What song are you trending downward to this week?

Here's one obvious candidate.

You will have read some version of the claim: By not voting, you are simply giving more weight to the votes of those who do bother to vote....In practical terms, you are voting for whoever happens to win.

Perhaps this is so. Of course, by the same logic, by not fighting, you are simply giving more weight to the violence of those who do bother to fight. Moreover, by not shopping, you are giving simply more weight to the purchases of those who do bother to shop. By not laboring, you are simply giving more weight to the value of those who do bother to labor. So we can dispense with the doctrine of pacifism. Boycotts should be avoided at all costs. General strikes should be mocked at every turn. And so forth.

In short: you are free to make any choice except the choice not to participate. Yes, who could disagree? In practical terms, that is exactly the logic everywhere on offer.

Today, filing the collection of Poems by Mao Zedong after having finished reading them, discovered that the volume fell next to Mallarme in the library.

From the NYT review of Traitor:

Samir, the son of an American mother and a Sudanese father, is an observant Muslim and a veteran of the Army Special Forces, a highly trained warrior whose allegiances are, at first and for a gratifyingly long time afterward, decidedly ambiguous.

He is, in other words, an elegantly conceived and suavely played construct, a theoretical being born out of a very real political conflict. Samir, enigmatic and quiet though he is, has less in common with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne than he does with some of the cold-war specters dreamed up by John le Carré in his prime. Samir’s doubleness is built into his biography, and whatever choice he makes is likely to constitute some form of betrayal.