A Society Adrift

Not Bored! have made available a new pdf file here of

A Society Adrift: More Interviews and Discussions on The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, Including Revolutionary Perspectives Today.

Translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service. Electronic publication date: October 2010.

Notice ii
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in English, with Standard Abbreviations v
Books by Cornelius Castoriadis Published in French, with Standard Abbreviations vii
Foreword x
On the Translation l
French Editors' Preface li
PART ONE: ITINERARY
The Project of Autonomy Is Not a Utopia (1993) 5
Autonomy Is an Ongoing Process: An Introductory Interview (1990) 16
Revolutionary Perspectives Today (1973) 35
Imaginary Significations (1981) 63
Response to Richard Rorty (1991) 95
On Wars in Europe (1992) 113
PART TWO: INTERVENTIONS
Is it Possible to Create a New Form of Society? (1977) 138
What Political Parties Cannot Do (1979) 156
The Stakes Today for Democracy (1986) 165
"We Are Going Through a Low Period . . . " (1986) 171
Do Vanguards Exist? (1987) 177
What a Revolution Is (1988) 189
Neither a Historical Necessity Nor Just a "Moral" Exigency: A Political and Human Exigency (1988) 199
When East Tips West (1989) 205
Market, Capitalism, Democracy (1990) 210
A "Democracy" Without Citizens' Participation (1991) 220
Gorbachev: No Reform, No Turning Back (1991) 226
War, Religion, and Politics (1991) 234
Communism, Fascism, Emancipation (1991) 242
Ecology Against the Merchants (1992) 247
A Society Adrift (1993) 250
On Political Judgment (1995) 264
No to Resignation, No to Archaism (1995) 269
A Unique Trajectory (1997) 273

Bigger Johnson

The September 27 issue of Publishers Weekly features an interview with Steven Johnson discussing his new book (see below) and the future of the publishing industry. It's well worth a read. I was particularly struck by Johnson's conception of ideas as networks, since it chimes in with some of the arguments advanced by Manuel Castells in his Information Age trilogy, the first volume of which is titled The Rise of the Network Society.

When I gave the book to Kevin Kelly to read, he wrote back, "It's a book about how ideas are networks that are made up of a network of ideas." I love that. An idea is not a single thing. It's literally a network in your brain, and it's almost always a network in terms of the flow of information that leads to the idea. A solitary moment of inspiration is absolutely the exception, not the rule.

Until I encountered your description of the Web as a developing city, complete with homage to Jane Jacobs, I hadn't realized how much I wanted a visual analogue to understand how the Web is evolving.

You know how people talk about American exceptionalism? I think there's a kind of Web exceptionalism, where people say the Web and the Internet have these magical properties, where open source software can happen and people can collaborate and make Wikipedia, but that these kinds of things never happen in the real world. Part of my argument is to show how these patterns of innovation have a long history in the so-called real world. When you think of the organizational structure that sustained Renaissance development as being partially the city states, you have to understand the particular quality of cities: they're not really owned by anybody. They're collectively built, and although they are the seat of commercial activity that is closed and propriety and market-driven, the space the city creates is not. When you push the analogy over to the biological systems and you can see the innovation that develops in those environments, you start to see deep patterns. People often talk about the Web like it's this 1960s commune—"Oh, the Web, weird things happen there!"

Where Good Ideas Come From

The always-interesting Steven Johnson, author of such books as Emergence and Everything Bad Is Good for You, has a new book out, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. In the October issue of Wired, he discusses the book with Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants.


Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Kelly: The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.

Johnson: At the end of my book, I try to look at that phenomenon systematically. I took roughly 200 crucial innovations from the post-Gutenberg era and figured out how many of them came from individual entrepreneurs or private companies and how many from collaborative networks working outside the market. It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.

Explicit Book Pr0n

To facilitate our readers' intellectual stimulation, I've replaced the original photos in the post below with higher-resolution pix from my camera, enabling them to see the spines of my unread tomes - and thus the true extent of my ignorance - more readily.  Any suggestions regarding books I might wish to discard will be entertained, providing you've already read it yourself and can give a précis of its shortcomings. ;-)

It's All Gone Very Quiet

I can't seriously believe that anyone misses posts at this blog all that much, but if you're wondering why there's not much happening here, it's because I've found myself caught up in a classic Socratic dilemma: The more I read, the more I realize how little I know, which means I have to read more, which results in me realizing how little I know, and round and round we go. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to have a firm opinion on anything. Of course, you might say, that never stopped me before, but that's because I hadn't read as much as I have now. ;-)

Here's some idea of the scale of the problem:

This is actually my CD shelf converted to hold books. My CDs are all in boxes and in the attic unless I play them regularly. There are one or two reference books here that I can knock off the list of "to reads," and there are a couple of books mixed in here that I've read but kept in the same place for ease of recollection.   Cassell's Dictionary of Slang is a cornucopia in its own right and deserves to be read in its entirety. At some point.

There's no great order to this collection, since I've bought new shelves recently to give me more space, but I've managed to keep the J.G. Ballards together.

These are actually books that I've read. Most of them, anyway. I hold onto them if they have reference or sentimental value, otherwise I pass them onto charity via my wonderful friend Trish. Looking at these now, I could get rid of a fair number, but I doubt anyone would want them. The framed photo is me and Felix Savon in Havana.  The unframed one is my nephew Ollie with his children's BAFTA.  My mom and dad bought me the Laurel & Hardy figurines.

Lots to go at here. Recent purchases include Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris, Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind, Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity, Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies, and The Rough Guide to Sex, which I bought thinking it was The Guide to Rough Sex. This bookcase above, incidentally, is two books deep.

This is supposed to be my bookcase of "next to reads" but there's an overflow on the adjoining case. I find myself picking from them at random for my train read, depending on how I feel that morning and how heavy the volume is. Heavy books get read at home. The big yellow volumes stacked horizontally are the last hard-copy editions of Readers' Guide Abstracts, before we went virtual. They're nice to have because I can show visitors I'm a published editor. Recently bought books on this case are Stefan Collini's Common Reading, my most recent purchase; Bakunin, by Mark Leier; Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; and Communication Power, by Manuel Castells. There are also two unread biographies of Engels I'm looking forward to.

This is the overflow bookcase of "next to reads." These are mostly books bought with the best of intentions, but when I actually consider the prospect of reading them, I manage to find something less worthy but more attractive. New purchases here usually have something to do with Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time program, which is why it features Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, writings by and about Hazlitt, and the In Our Time volume itself. There's about eight Steven Aylett books on this case that I really should have a go at, but none of them look as much fun as Bigot Hall.  If you buy ANY books shown here, make it that one.

Yes, I've even got bookcases in the porch. This is the motherlode, containing some books that I've had with me for nigh on a decade. It's a kind of elephants' graveyard of unread books, the desperately worthy and intellectual stuff that I've promised myself I'll read but which become less attractive the closer I get to them. Some of them I've dipped into and put back, and I suspect they may never get read. Others are just sitting there until I've ploughed through the more urgent material, urgent being defined as more engaging rather than relevant. It isn't that I have ADHD so much as an overstimulating job that presents subjects that arouse my curiosity with such regularity that I cannot satisfy it before another subject arises. Highlights of this bookcase include Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought, Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, and Darconville's Cat, by Alexander Theroux. All fascinating in their own way. I imagine.

To finish on a defiant and optimistic note, two cases of books that I've read.  These are books either that I intend to hold onto—all my Sartre and Castoriadis books, for instance—or books that I haven't yet had a chance to pass on to Trish.  The most recently read books are in the case below, stacked horizontally.  This bookcase is also two books' deep.  The books I read on holiday, and which you'll find listed in the "My Library" app to the left of this page, I either left behind in Cyprus or passed on to Martin. I notice, looking at this picture, that there are even books on this final shelf that are there because I had nowhere else to put them and they still remain to be read. The Fernand Braudel trilogy, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, and Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. I shall probably wait for the DVDs to come out.

So that's the story. As to why nobody else on the C&S team blogs here . . . I'll let them tell you.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Buzzcocks - Promises

Urban Wanderings

The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, (2009) Verso.

It isn't entirely clear why Verso thought now would be a good time to publish a book of extracts from the writings of the Situationists about the urban environment and experience. Editor Tom McDonough, whose excellent introductory essay renders much of the subsequent material in the book redundant, tells us in the acknowledgments at the rear that,

This book would not have come into being if not for Mike Davis, who first suggested a reader that would concentrate on the Situationist International's work on the city, and I would not have been involved in this project if not for the generous support of Rowan Wilson and Tom Penn at Verso, who invited me to edit this volume and who saw it through to publication,

which I suppose helps to identify at least three of the culprits. The decision to publish is peculiar for a number of reasons. First of all, there is the dearth of material to work with. As readers go, this is a short one, with McDonough's essay comprising the first 30 pages of the 242 pages of text and the inclusion of pre-Situationist writings and pieces by the non-Situationist Henri Lefebvre helping to pad things out. Second, there is not a great deal in these writings that remains relevant; the texts are very much of their moment, and while they may therefore prove to be of some use to undergraduates in architecture or urban studies, at best they constitute a historical curio, an anti-modernist declaration of war with elements of romanticism and, in the case of Guy Debord's writings, an almost Nietzschean celebration of youth and bodily exhilaration (someone should write a thesis on Debord's fascination with the word "thrilling"). In Simon Parker's book Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, which, "brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies . . .," the Situationists merit only one mention, and even at the time they were active, McDonough tells us,

. . . when critic Françoise Chouay published her epochal anthology on modern-city planning in 1965, the S.I. went unmentioned.[)] Having categorically refused all architectural experimentation . . . by this point the Situationists had become all but invisible within the arguments that were shaking up architecture and urbanism at this time.

This is because, McDonough explains,

In its place, the S.I. was developing a disabused theory of the place of building and city-planning in advanced capitalism, and sketching the outlines of its negation.

Which brings me to my third reason: the argument advanced by the Situationists themselves that urban theory that is not at the same time a total critique of capitalist society is pointless. While McDonough's judicious selection of texts does at least allow us to see how the Situationists' thought arrived at this conclusion over a period of a decade and a half, the irony should not be lost on us that it comes at the end of a book that has isolated the Situationists' writings on the city from the rest of their thought. Here's Debord in an extract from The Society of the Spectacle that is included towards the end of McDonough's book:

Capitalist production has unified space, which is no longer limited by external societies. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization. As the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market had to shatter all regional and legal barriers, and all the guild restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of craft production, it had also to annul the autonomy and quality of places. This homogenizing power is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.

. . .

This society that abolishes geographical distance shelters a new internal distance inside itself, as spectacular separation.

. . .

Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. the same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space.

It is at this point in their trajectory, in fact, that the Situationists' thought becomes interesting and relevant. Notwithstanding Debord's heavy indebtedness to Hegel, Marx, and the Surrealists, his theorizing of the spectacular society in 1967, prior to Les Événements that catapulted the Situationists to notoriety, was subsequently to provide both inspiration and a vocabulary for postmodernists like Baudrillard and Lyotard (a former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie), whose defanged Situationism provided the basis for the academicization of revolutionary theory, a prime example of the kind of recuperation that the Situationists warned us against. Even the classic Marxist text on the subject, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, which attempts to reduce the postmodern experience to an epiphenomenon of a change in the regime of accumulation within capitalism beginning around 1972, manages to excise the Situationists from the debate, even though they had thoroughly formulated a description and explanation of what subsequently came to be described as the postmodern experience five years before this purported change in the regime of accumulation began. McDonough's book thus provides at least a partial corrective and a necessary one.

Social and political science students of a certain vintage will still be able to recollect the delight of their first encounter with Situationist theory and practice, particularly if they recall the wittiness of its détournements, the emphasis on pleasure and autonomy at the expense of the Protestant ethic and puritanical doctrinaire "revolutionary" parties, its insurrectionary posturing and enthusiasm for pranks. With the benefit of hindsight it's a perspective that feminist theorists of urbanism might easily tear to pieces, and there are gaping holes in the Situationists' own account of the city and the urban experience that subsequent theorists, such as Castells and, indeed, Harvey, might drive a coach and horses through, if you've forgive the metaphor. What's more, in an era of iPods, iPhones, portable TV and DVD players, flash mobs, YouTube, street festivals, handheld video, and the like, the opportunities afforded individuals and groups to manipulate their affective response to any environment is already in the hands of the consumer, albeit in commodified form; not only has Situationist theory been recuperated, but so, it would appear, have its solutions. Nonetheless, as Sadie Plant has ably shown in her work The Most Radical Gesture, Situationist ideas continue to inform and pervade our political, philosophical and theoretical debates. Moreover, they enable us to more adequately situate and contextualize both postmodern theory and postmodernity. While McDonough's book manages to decontextualize the Situationists' writings on urbanism, we can hope that readers of it will be stimulated enough by its contents to look for and explore other, more germane Situationist texts that will help them understand Situationist theory as a whole and their writings on the city within it.

Give Em What They Don't Want

Larry Lash (yes, honestly) in the March 2010 Opera News:

In several early Verdi works, there are passages where the music doesn't quite fit the action. Let's call it the oom-pah-pah factor. A notable example is the lilting march tune that accompanies Duncan's entrance in Macbeth. A director today can search for a dignified solution or give in to the sheer campiness of the situation. The latter was the approach chosen by Vera Nemirova for her production of Macbeth at Wiener Staatsoper (seen Dec. 7): the king and his kilted retinue pranced onstage in a silly dance that actually suited the music but not the dramatic situation. Booing erupted. Actually, booing began five minutes into the performance, when the witches were revealed to be a coven of society ladies in a blackened forest, gathered to observe performance-art involving nude women, slathered with paint, sliding on a large canvas.

Nemirova essentially played the opera for comedy. As there is much bouncy music in Macbeth (including the rarely performed ballet music), few characters escaped being given choreography of some sort. Add to this a chubby Duncan taking a bubble bath and flopping on the Macbeths' bed for a nap; Banquo's murderers in trench coats, white gloves and red clown noses carrying red helium balloons; blond bombshell Lady Macbeth entering with a baby stroller that concealed a machine gun; and those witches, back in the forest, clad in white bathrobes, hair wrapped in white towels, reenacting the murderous history of Scotland. The resulting incoherent cocktail of absurdity drew booing and yelling throughout the entire performance, at times obliterating the music or forcing conductor Guillermo Garcia Calvo to stop. It's a wonder that Nemirova and her design team weren't blown offstage by the booing and heckling that greeted their repeated curtain calls.

Disapproval wasn't reserved for the production team. Erika Sunnegårdh, making her debut as Lady Macbeth, was booed almost as harshly as Nemirova, and not just at her curtain call: after a less-than-satisfactory sleepwalking scene, she bungled the high D-flat badly. Save for a few loud notes on top, her inflexible voice sounded like that of a Soubrette, and not a very good one at that, despite a flabbergasting résumé that includes Turandot, Senta, the Fidelio Leonore and Abigaille.

Totally out of his depth, Stefan Kocan was booed as well for his off-pitch, lightweight Banquo. Conductor Calvo took a severe drubbing, too, for his lack of command and coordination between stage and pit. Dimitri Pittas, making his company debut as Macduff, got a hero's reception, but while his aria was sung impressively, his steely tone lacks Verdian warmth.

Overcoming all these odds, Simon Keenlyside scored an absolute triumph in the title role. His gorgeous lyric baritone is at its zenith, generous and positively glowing. He is a natural actor: it was fascinating to watch his Macbeth's gradual mental disintegration. In this farrago of a production, he never lost an ounce of dignity, but he did blow his cool when the Uzi-carrying pram refused to stay put: Keenlyside walked upstage and kicked it, dispatching it into the woods.

Capitalist Provides Rope

Murdoch's Wall Street Journal provides an excerpt from Richard Wolin's book The Wind from the East.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

Boston Spaceships - How Wrong You Are

He's Also a Naturell Kokbar

Nice story here from Libération:

Un Grec de 77 ans qui figure par erreur sur les pots de yaourt de recette turque vendus par une laiterie suédoise a obtenu plus de 160.000 euros de dédommagements.

A 77-year-old Greek bloke has received €160,000 in damages from a Swedish dairy after his picture was used on pots of Turkish-style yogurt.

. . .

Le Grec avait été alerté au printemps par un ami vivant à Stockholm. Il avait immédiatement réclamé près de 5 millions d’euros à Lindahl pour l’avoir assimilé à un Turc et avoir utilisé depuis des années son image sans autorisation sur ce yaourt populaire vendu dans presque tous les supermarchés de Suède.

La laiterie Lindahl plaidait le malentendu, en expliquant avoir acheté la photographie de bonne foi à une banque d’images. Selon les médias suédois, le moustachu se nomme Minas Karatzoglis.

The Greek bloke was alerted in spring by a mate living in Stockholm. He immediately demanded around €5 million from Lindahl for calling him a Turk and for having used his picture without authorisation for some years on this popular yogurt sold in nearly all Swedish supermarkets.

The dairy said it was a misunderstanding, explaining that it had bought the picture in good faith from an image bank. According to Swedish media, his name is Minas Karatzoglis.

Define Sad

Or, for that matter, "adolescent."

Today's Thinking Allowed:

Faces and what we might glean from them. That will be our topic today when I meet the author of ‘About Faces’, a study of the manner in which facial traits have been used as a way to understand character.

That’s at four o’clock today or after the midnight news on Sunday or on our downloadable podcast.

Also today… Is it sad to hang on to your adolescent musical tastes?

Laurie

Eco Eco

Entirely on a whim, this afternoon I googled the phrase "Ecological Economics" just to see if there was anything that could help me develop my own half-baked extemperaneous reflections on the shortcomings of neoclassical pricing and the labour theory of value. Lo and behold, there's an entire school of economists devoted to the subject:

Ecological economics distinguishes itself from neoclassical economics primarily by its assertion that the economy is an embedded within an environmental system. Ecology deals with the energy and matter transactions of life and the Earth, and the human economy is by definition contained within this system. Ecological economists feel neoclassical economics has ignored the environment, at best relegating it to be a subset of the human economy.

However, this belief disagrees with much of what the natural sciences have learned about the world, and, according to Ecological Economics, completely ignores the contributions of Nature to the creation of wealth e.g., the planetary endowment of scarce matter and energy, along with the complex and biologically diverse ecosystems that provide goods and ecosystem services directly to human communities: micro- and macro-climate regulation, water recycling, water purification, storm water regulation, waste absorption, food and medicine production, pollination, protection from solar and cosmic radiation, the view of a starry night sky, etc.

It turns out that there's even an International Society for Ecological Economics. And most considerately, the site carries an entire volume, an ebook entitled An Introduction to Ecological Economics. Chapter 2, here, gives a brief historical run-down of the development of the theory and, in reference to the shortcomings of Marxism, says,

Marx and his followers in communist countries have made a negative contribution to the allocative efficiency problem, even while highlighting issues of just distribution. Their ideological rejection of rent and interest as necessary prices, and their insistence on a labor theory of value that neglected nature’s contribution were responsible for much of the environmental destruction in communist countries.

Well, that's what I said four years ago. I could have saved myself a lot of pfaffing around if I'd had the sense back then to do some simple checking.

Bugger.

Anarchist Writers

A shameful oversight on my part not to include the Anarchist Writers blog on our blogroll. Consider this now remedied.

You'll find news, history, theory, interviews, sexual politics, reviews, and where Karl Marx got his ideas from. Even the wrong ones!

Frank's Fantastic Send-Off

Because of the sheer amount of love and goodwill, Chris Sievey's family has agreed to host a send-off for Frank Sidebottom which will be held at Castlefield Arena on 8th July between 7:00pm and 10:00pm. The event is totally free and will feature the likes of Badly Drawn Boy, Charlie Chuck and others. More details can be found at

http://www.radiotimperley.com/franks-fantastic-send-off-information/

We hope that you, your friends and colleagues will all be able to attend the event to celebrate and remember the character of Frank Sidebottom specifically as it's bound to be a very joyous occasion filled with much fun and frivolity.



Radio Timperley is also campaigning to get Frank to Number One:

http://www.radiotimperley.com/lets-get-frank-to-number-one/

There's an iTunes link you can click on.