jane dark's sugarhigh!

note to arrighi, badiou, raunig et al

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

cheoisie

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.

As certain as this account is, this isn't exactly what I found shocking in Scott's treatise, though it is something like an inevitable outcome of what we take to be an even more striking moment. Indeed, this particular review has what is perhaps the most pitiful and embarrassing concession available to anyone who calls themselves a critic:

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.

Emphasis ours, dude, emphasis ours. Let's clarify what the critic has just announced, in all its shamefulness. Via his own syllogism, to be "human" is to be bourgeois. A purportedly serious student of cinema, Tony Scott has just declared that he accepts the ruling ideology as in fact the only possible measure not just of art but humanity; that he will not even try to engage with a figure who denies it; and that, as a critic, he is only interested in conventionality. Oh, one can be certain that he is open to that particular kind of unconventionality one finds in The Ice Storm or the like — which is to say, that particular performance of noncomformity which is the very soul of bourgeois conventionality. But should an artwork actually proffer a character who is indeed outside "the usual trappings of bourgeois subjectivity" (his words, not ours), Scott's obligations as a critic and capacities as a human come to an abrupt end.

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.

words. matter.

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.

We here at sugarhigh wish we believed this. The fear is that this argument is analogous to the hope that the socialist-baiting of Obama in the pre-election twilight would have the ironic effect of inserting the term, and thus the possibility, into the national discussion — that we would have the spectral presence of the concept "socialism" haunting the White House and the future.

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.

in these times

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

Or, can the subalt-A speak?