While thinking about Dave’s post on shock and awe, I stumbled over this quote which merits a post of its own. It’s from Jack Common, a working class writer from the 1930s (more on him here).

The dark age technique of unlearning is what is needed, and it is not such a strange thing as it seems. We have an acquisitive view of learning as of a thing you add to the personality, this being the opinion proper to an acquisitive society. Yet when you learn to swim you are really escaping from doubt and awkwardness into an innate swimming rhythm which everybody possesses, rather marvellously, whether they use it or not. And queerer than that, there is the case of the recently developed art of cycling. When I took it up, the man who showed me how pointed out that it wasn’t a question of learning to ride, what you had to do was to unlearn the inability to ride. He was perfectly right. It is all there if you can get it.

It’s the concept of unlearning that caught my eye, which runs counter to the suggestion that in times of crisis “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. I don’t want to start banging the anti-intellectual drum, but maybe the opportunity thrown up by a crisis is precisely the chance to “unlearn the fears and inhibitions by which you are lessened” and reveal the “Eldorado of infinite potentiality”. And it also links into my general uneasiness about the role of ‘experts’. It’s easily done. You read a few books, write a few words, and all of a sudden people are asking you to provide them with the answer. Or worse, you think you have the answer…

Money and finance don’t normally get much discussed on this site. All that might change. Last summer’s ‘subprime’ mortgage crisis in the United States (and the run on Northern Rock bank-cum-building society over here) has developed into a full-blown ‘credit crisis’: the global financial markets are in what the commentators describe as ‘turmoil’ and ‘catastrophe’ threatens. Last week, the US’s fifth-largest investment bank, Bear Stearns, imploded. In a ‘rescue’ orchestrated by the Federal Reserve, another bank, JPMorgan Chase mopped up its shares, which had been trading for $170 a year ago, for two bucks each. Jimmy Cayne, Bear’s chairman and former chief executive, who held a 5% stake, has seen his ‘worth’ fall from $1.2 billion to a mere $11 million. Apparently managers are having to sell holiday homes. (What were we saying about resentment?)

But it’s all more interesting and complicated — and worrying and exciting — than this. Not only is there financial crisis. There’s also recession in the US — economists define recession as two successive quarterly falls in output — but if it wasn’t poor people finding they could no longer keep up with mortgage payments that triggered the subprime crisis then what was it? And central bankers in Europe and elsewhere are worried about inflation. (‘Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice’ — this was a former IMF chief economist quoting poet Robert Frost in an address to a recent meeting of monetary policymakers. Fire = recession; ice = inflation.) So, the return of stagflation?

Let’s look at inflation. Well commodity* prices are rising rapidly, but what’s behind this? A lot of it comes down to climate change activism in the North and workers’ struggle in the global South. Greater demand for biofuels (so we can stop emitting CO2 without changing the way we live) is pushing up the price of all crops. As people get richer in the South they are demanding more meat and this also puts upward pressure on crop prices — since it takes something like 6kg of wheat (or equivalent) to produce a single kilo of meat. There is much commentary about ‘China’s voracious appetite for resources’, which is pushing up the prices of commodities such as steel, copper and so on, but the real wages of Chinese production workers have risen by an average of 11% every year over the past decade (compared with 3% a year over the previous ten years). However much this statistic is phrased in the passive voice doesn’t change the fact that there’s an active subject here.

But what sparked me to post this, was a piece in this week’s Economist, ‘Apocalypse now?’. With ‘the world going to hell in a handcart’, the piece wonders what ‘you’ [i.e. a financial investor] should buy. And here we’re getting back to more familiar Free Association territory. Because we’ve written before about how at times of crisis (far-from-equilibrium situations, ‘moments of excess’, states of exception…) illusions and ‘ideology’ are stripped away, reality seems to be laid bare. This is as true for ‘them’ as it is for ‘us’ — which is why The Economist, say, is usually a much better read than The Guardian.

In the pub after our recent talk about capitalism and climate change, discussion turned to money and somebody suggested the universal equivalent is a mutually agreed fantasy. Exactly! This precisely the problem facing investors now. There’s no mutual agreement on what anything is ‘worth’, or (and in the world of capitalism/finance this is the same thing) will be worth at some point in the future.** After discussing the problems with holding government bonds (the government, the US government at least, won’t default, but what if its currency the dollar keeps falling in value?), depositing money in banks (what if they collapse, like Bear Stearns?) or buying gold (but it’s taken gold almost three decades to regain its price of 1980) the author, ‘Buttonwood’, concludes:

In a complete meltdown, for example during world wars and revolutions, it is hard to find anything that keeps its value. Stockmarkets collapse. Governments default on their debt. Private property is no longer respected, either because governments seize the assets or because goods cannot be protected from criminals. Jewellery might hold its worth, but you had better have a good hiding-place. Think of all the treasures looted by the Nazis or the Red Army.

But we also see here how bourgeois commentators still don’t get it. Buttonwood is assuming that ‘value’ is something objective, a property intrinsic to a thing. It’s not, it’s social. S/he can’t move beyond categories like ‘government’ and ‘criminal’, or conceive of revolutionaries who aren’t of the bolshevik sort. Why would I want to loot jewellery? And, more importantly, it’s only a store of ‘value’ in a world of abstract labour. And here’s the other big assumption. Buttonwood assumes any such period of uncertainty and ‘suspension’ of the law of value will be temporary, that after some period of months or even a few years, things will return to capitalist ‘normality’.

So, what should ‘you’ do? Buttonwood quotes approvingly the advice offered by some ‘Wall Street veteran’ who suggests that ‘investors should own, as insurance against the apocalypse, “a farm or a ranch somewhere far off the beaten track but which you can get to quickly and easily.” Well, as Buttonwood admits, this assumes ‘war and disorder are avoided’, but it reminds me of Marx’s story in Capital of ‘unhappy Mr Peel’:

Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

And this is why all this is exciting for us. Because this crisis is a crisis of value — what things are ‘worth’ — and that means that it has the potential to become a crisis of values (plural): what do we value, what sort of world(s) do we want to live in?

* Being good Marxists here at freelyassociating.org, we understand a commodity to be that peculiar amalgam of (capitalist) value and use-value, the product of abstract and concrete labour, but in economist-parlance commodities are agricultural goods, such as wheat, coffee, pork bellies (bacon) and soya (yes, all you vegans, soya is a commodity too) and minerals and metals, such as oil, steel and gold.

** One of the main ‘points’ of finance and financial markets — along with their disciplinary function — is to convert uncertainty into risk. I’ve just started reading An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, by Randy Martin. In the Introduction, the author suggests that ‘preemption, bringing the future into the present, has since the 1970s been the guiding principle for fiscal policy.’ (As it has been for foreign policy/politics, such as the ‘war on terror’.) And then this bit, which is great: ‘In terms of the experience of time, preemption means that the future is profaned. The future no longer holds a promise that the constraints of the present can be transcended or transformed. Without a conviction that the future bears our dreams, the idea of progress becomes difficult to sustain.’ Maybe this is why most of us find finance boring, because it holds no promise, it leaves no space for hope.

“It’s true that there is in you a kind of air of communist youth, summer camp, ‘onward comrades!’ and all that. It’s leftist kitsch. But this is only one of your aspects, because, on the other hand, what moves you in all of this is a kind of passion for the currents of active energy that blow gusts of air into the social body, which then starts to pulsate, in an alternation between the destabilization of the reigning cartographies and the mobilization of a blast of collective intelligence which invents new forms of life. Every time it happens, you become chidlike. Godard said that men don’t have much childhood and are very childish. Well, if what mobilizes your childhood can be called a “people,” making you radiant, running in all directions, in this case the “people” isn’t a thing – it isn’t a class, or group, or nation. “People” is the name of these currents, which are not to be confused with the places that they agitate, with the historical contexts that they help to create…

It’s toward these currents that you have spent your life travelling. It has more to do with comets, as Teca said, with a “becoming-comet,” than with a “becoming-scout” or a “becoming-priest.” Perhaps the boy scout and the priest appear because they are the only way, or the age-old way, that we have for dealing with this kind of thing, which lacks a language of its own. That’s why they’re so kitsch. But, behind or through this priest and/or scout, what most draws the attention in the quality of your presence is precisely the opposite of these figures: your insistence on the importance of being attentive to the creation of a different logic, new languages – “minor languages” as you and Gilles call them – your desire to participate actively in this creation.”

(from Molecular Revolution in Brazil)

I really like this quote. It’s Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik complimenting Felix Guattari, after a 1982 trip they made through Brazil where they met and discussed with different activist groups and in particular with members of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party) including with a young Lula, now the Brazilian president. I like the image of active forces gusting through different bodies and animating them. I also like this concept of becoming-comet, as a subjectivity that starts blazing when it comes into contact with active forces, but has to take its place alongside the child-like enthusiasm of the becoming-scout and the holder of received wisdom of the becoming-priest. As Rolnik says you need: “the coexistence of all these characters and many more still.”

What would a diagram of a becoming-comet look like? Well it can’t be seen when it’s moving through the stillness of the outer solar system but when it comes within the influence of solar heat and wind it bursts into visibility. In fact it makes those active forces visible. We can only see such forces in their effects on bodies and at certain times, particular bodies have affects that illuminate particular forces. Guattari might have been one and Johnny Rotten at a very particular point in time and space might well have been another comet, one that gave off such a bright detritus that you can still just about make it out. But the important point is we mustn’t mistake the body for the force. Those forces move on or change direction and effect; the body in turn might stop being receptive or be unable to find the right affect or combinations to detect those forces. Then all you are left with is the burnt-out husk, a mere cinder of what was. Such is the present-day John Lydon – trapped in a caricature of his younger self, not the vital embodiment of the emergent common that he once was.

Comets have historically been seen as the harbingers of doom but perhaps that’s just a way to talk of them as the harbingers of change. They accompany momentous events. Of course we think we know about comets now, that we can predict their arrival but there are plenty of comets out there with such large orbits that from our historical perspective they are for all intents and purposes unpredictable in both their arrival and their course.

I really like the image of affective refrains created in more intensive moments behaving like disorganising, destabilising barbs of other potential presents, pasts and futures lodged in our organised bodies and occasionally helping to dissolve them. And I want to say bodies not just subjectivities because as we know these refrains can be corporeal – how we hold our bodies, where our bodies end –Cue Hives anecdote 3a. One of the pitfalls with all this is it’s a little like looking at a photo album – a narrative constructed out of flashes means nostalgia must be guarded against. But then again we can’t just leave the past alone as though it’s all over. The past is unwritten or at the very least every present includes a re-writing of the past. Relatedly time is not homogenous, there are periods of intensification and drastic divergence when the future does seem unwritten and then there are periods of cloying, clagging impotence when the present seems utterly effaced by an unalterable but still fictional future.

 Anyway something else I watched last week was Paul Morley’s “Pop! What is it good for?” and one of the things I got from that was the idea that songs carry ‘invisibles’ around with them. The power of pop is that we can’t get it out of our heads. It enters by osmosis and provides us with the refrains out of which we build our worlds. There was a section where Richard X was commenting on his mash-up “Freak Like Me”. He claimed that the creativity of the mash-up is recognising and playing with the invisibles – the affects, feelings and associations that songs bring up. It’s the mashing up of these that are the element of creativity. More than just Mash-ups all pop trades on these invisibles As it eats itself. In another section Suggs talked about how the influence of vaudeville had unconsciously snuck into Madness, and punk, through the influence of parents and wider culture. This is another way of thinking about invisibles. In fact that same point was brilliantly made in Julian Temple’s other Punk film: “The Filth and the Fury” when he shows Max Wall’s influence on the Johnny Rotten persona.

Pop trades on possibilities, re-invention. On the creation of the new out of repetition and imitation. At its best it’s about the introduction of a strangeness into the everyday. That strangeness is a moment in the repotentialisation of everyday life but capital is about depotentialisation. Capital needs to subordinate all life and creativity to it’s own life, that is it’s need to grow. And surely that is the story of pop music – How the residue of moments of autonomous creativity are carried as invisibles into music made for purely commercial reasons. Then vice versa how the potential of those moments and affects are eaten by capital’s need for a novelty that changes nothing. Yet the whole idea of recuperation always seems too pat and easily done. What about the idea that capital constantly has to eat stuff that contain elements it finds indigestible. As capital circulates, as it has to, it also spreads those invisible indigestibles. As a quote from Howard Slater puts it:

What should be stated is that music is not revolutionary per se but carries with it many presuppositions of an awareness of a need for social change; not least in terms of its activation of desire in the listener, its opening up of unconscious and imaginary terrains and its proclivity towards social interaction. It can be rhetorical, propagandist and a source of optimism and hope, and from jazz scenes through anarcho-punk to rave and techno, music has always been attached to counter-cultural and political movements, exacerbating dissatisfaction with the status quo and working the contradictions between ideas of reality and what it could be transformed to be…          

Hang on a minute wasn’t I supposed to be talking about the Strummer documentary? Well one of the interesting things about it was that the Clash weren’t really the main story. The stuff about the early Squatter, 101er days was great, it set up the DIY ethic and reminded you of the importance of that holey space where weeds can grow. Weeds of course are just plants that have escaped domestication. Then when it got to the Clash it was all a bit familiar and not quite as interesting. The real story of the film, though, was Strummer trying to recover from the harmful effects of fame. The beauty of it was that the recovery only came about when he engaged with rave, free parties and festivals – a new wave of that mix of music, politics and intense collectivity. The solution to celebrity is to dissolve into collectivity.A bit ironic then that the main fault with the film was that it was a bit star fucker. Loads of people were cut out of the story to be replaced by famous friends and admirer’s recollections.  Why does any of this matter?  Well one reason to talk about stuff like this is that it could help us deal with the danger of a new asceticism and purism the possibility of which can be detected in some climate change activism. The idea that ordinary people are the problem. An appreciation of how widespread the affects of revolutionary politics go may help with this. Also those affects have to be part of any calculation of what is possible. But also I think these sort of experiences are central to how we need to think about the role of the political militant. At least partly because the Strummer story is about how at certain times the creation of the common moves through a singular event. Such as the way Johnny Rotten’s style, his innovations, become the repository of people’s changing desires and then the means of their transmission. This can be a destructive experience for the people caught up in such singular events. John Lydon has obviously never recovered or dealt with its inheritance but Strummer did, or at least he made a good fist of it. Militants, and others, need to avoid getting trapped in the transcendent fictions of fame, which Strummer came to realise is illusionary. Just look at the elevation of Joss Garman from Plane Stupid as the latest activist celebrity. But it also relates to what Argentinean militants have called political sadness. Once you’ve been caught up in a singular moment – where you were an activist in your own life – how do you cope with its passing. When possibility closes up and you move from the joyful affect of powerfulness and increased collective capacities into the sadness that comes from those capacities and potential closing up. A life is made from such singular moments and “The Future is Unwritten” ends on a nice commentary from Joe when he offers us an ethic for living: 

“ And so now I’d like to say: People can change anything they want to and that means everything in the world… greed is going nowhere They should have that on a billboard in Times square. Without people you’re nothing. Anyway that’s my spiel.” 

I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness.

Gay liberation had really exploded. Homosexual culture had really taken over — Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring. Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos. I mean, come on, ‘Disco, Disco Duck’? I don’t think so.

So we said, ‘No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.’ People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, ‘Fuck you, you faggots.’

Mass movements are always so un-hip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

But as far as us being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay. No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want. I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories. I’d be going, ‘Wow, what happened then?’

What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear. The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way. And was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it.

In the news today is the discovery of a tape recording of the 1970 Kent State Massacre. It reveals that the National Guard troopers who shot four students dead were ordered to open fire. This is important because it shows a degree of deliberation in the massacre. The story kept to at the time was of spontaneous shooting triggered by panicking soldiers. The event had a huge effect, triggering a national student strike in the US involving university and high school students. The slogan of the protests was: They can’t kill us all.

I’m not reporting this naively believing that revealing the violence of the state, the iron fist in the velvet glove, is enough to save us but it does make me wonder about the mechanism that triggers this sort of phase shift into new levels of violence and how they relate to wider shifts in regimes of power. This relates to a debate we’ve been having in the Turbulence collective on the idea that this century has seen a strategic deployment of generalised war as a means of overcoming the failings of neo-liberalism.

Of course the Kent State shootings make you think of the turn of the century shootings of demonstrators, first in Gothenburg and then in Genoa. I remember thinking about Kent State on first hearing about the Gothenburg shootings. I was reading a newspaper report flying back from a Football tournament in Germany. I turned to a friend (little Matt) and said “Christ they’ve moved to bullets so quickly.” I wasn’t so much shocked at the level of violence but how early in the cycle of struggles the police had escalate to that level and were soon to tip over to a murderous one.

Apart from the speed of the escalation the other shocking thing over the next few months was that this new hyper-violent attitude towards protests appeared to be imposed right across Europe and North America at the same time. It was like a globalised race to the bottom in power relations, with Third World policing exported to the west. This wasn’t just the use of guns but the early and undiscriminating use of violence against protests seen most comprehensively at Genoa. Over the next few years it begged the question of the relation that this militarization had with the Neo-conservatives’ open strategy of imposing war – not as a continuation of politics by other means but as a means of managing society.

That last phrase is a bastardisation of Foucault in “Society must be Defended” and perhaps the problem might make a little more sense if we conceptualise it with the dispositifs of power he examines. The exemplary violence against the protests and then the imposition of war both show a movement towards sovereign forms of power. Of course Guantanamo bay fits with this and taken together might explain the popularity over the last few years of the concepts of sovereignty, and exception as the foundational outside of sovereignty, that Agamben has reintroduced.

I’m interested in the idea that there is a link between exception and excess. Negri criticises Agamben by saying his lack of social movement experience leads him to start with the structures of power over, constituted power. This makes him unable to make the leap downwards to connect it with the animating constituent power. I agree but think that Negri (who started life as a constitutional theorist) also starts with Empire and not with Multitude.

I’d argue that the state of exception could be produced out of a moment of excess. That the fear and uncertainty caused by moments of excess can provoke recourse to sovereignty from above and political sadness from below. The latter is a term that Collectivo Situationes use to describe the drawing back and closing of off potential experienced after the high point of struggle in Argentina. It refers to the temptation to allow the re-establishment of sovereign power because of an inability to cope productively with uncertainty. Then again, of course, neo-liberalism contains it’s own precarity and so carries its own potential to resort to sovereignty. Perhaps the narrative runs like this:

The first ‘heroic phase’ of the movement of movements is an attempt to escape the dispositifs of neo-liberal governmentality. The moment of excess within the movement runs into a sovereign response which is then reinforced by the excessive counter-sovereign violence on 9/11, which provides the neo-conservatives with the big opening they take advantage of to escape neo-liberalism’s gathering problems. This raises the idea that exception is produced by the challenge of either a constitutive moment of excess or sovereign violent excess. Perhaps it doesn’t matter which one of these it is from the sovereign’s point of view.

Of course all concrete assemblages are mixed. There are many different strategies being followed at any one time. They may just exist with a small circle of cranks until their time arrives, just look at the history of neo-liberal ideas. It’s important to resist a conspiracy view of power, where great men sit in a room and decide the time is now right for 10% more sovereignty in the mix. From the angle outlined above the mechanisms of power still seem obscured and slightly mystified, we can’t make the leap up, but the important thing is to retain the point of view of the movements. The problematic from this perspective becomes: how can we defend our moments of excess from sovereign violence without ourselves finding recourse in the sadness of sovereignty?

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess during which we feel that total connection with our fellow human beings, when everything becomes possible, when absolutely anything could happen! Those moments when our energy threatens – or rather promises – to spark a cascade of changes which sweep through society, opening up a whole new range of possibilities. When we rupture capital’s fabric of domination: breaking time. Rapture!

But these events – these moments of excess – don’t last forever. It’s simply not possible for our bodies and minds to survive that level of intensity indefinitely. And indefinite ‘events’ probably aren’t even desirable. We frequently leave lovers and/or loved-ones behind to travel to such gatherings. And we miss them! Or we know our allotment or garden needs tending. Or there’s a favourite cycle ride or view or cityscape we need to enjoy again. ‘There is a rose and I should be with her. There is a town unlike any other.’

So what happens when we ‘return’ to the ‘real world’? Counter-summit mobilisations (say) allow this immensely productive focusing of our energies, but how can we sustain this movement in our ‘habitual lives’. How can we ‘do politics’ in the ‘real world’? How can we live a life? And we don’t mean simply survive, hanging on in there until the next event… or our fortnight’s holiday in the sun, or our Friday-night bender, or our Sunday-afternoon walk in the park, or our ‘adventure weekend’ – none of which are any real escape from capitalism at all, but simply another form of capitalist (re)production, recreation of ourselves as workers. We mean live: life despite capitalism.

We don’t really have too many answers to these questions. But we believe that thinking about them can help us to better understand the function of social centres, say, and the way we conceive the borders between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between what is ‘pure’ and what is not. Thinking about these questions can help us understand the potential of various issues and struggles – urban development and ‘regeneration’, climate change, precarity and so on – perhaps help us recognise our own power in a productive way, that is, in a way which allows it to resonate and become amplified. It involves recognising that we always live in the real world, that there are no ‘pure spaces’, there is no ‘pure politics’, and that we should welcome this. Because purity is also sterility. It’s the messiness of our ‘habitual’ lives which gives them their potential. This messiness, this ‘impurity’, the contaminations of different ideas, values and modes of being (and becoming) are the conditions which allow mutations, some of which will be productive. It’s from this primordial soup of the ‘real world’ that new life will spring. ‘Only in the real world do things happen like they do in my dreams.’