On the commensurability of nineteenth century slave law, the development of intellectual property law and the commodity form in the U.S.
‘Or perhaps the problem is that it can be had everywhere, and that is the source of [Harriet Beecher] Stowe’s expressed fear. I began with that fear–that anyone can “trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money”–in part because it wed this paradox of the commodity form to a certain panic at the very conception of the human (panic at the law’s threatened violations of the soul); but what really deserves emphasis here is Stowe’s alarm at the fugitive’s promotion to the status of universal equivalent. For it is this turn in Stowe’s thought that suggests that the fugitive is implicated in broader transformations in commercial law and culture. The law’s purpose with regards to the fugitive, as Stowe appears to see, is to manage the slave’s coeval status as material property and willing self; but that purpose, as she also appears to see, has evolved in the direction of managing the relation between the alienable (property) and the inalienable (the self) as a simple function of abstraction implicit in property, as a rigorous arithmetic of fungible units. Some fluctuating measure of “souls” plus some fluctuating measure of “bodies” yields “an equivalent to money.” In this sense, the problem of the fugitive in law and society, as Stowe perhaps could show but could not see, is the problem of transcendent abstraction. […] Legal forms mediate between the commitments of contract and the errantry of monetary values. The fugitive (as much of a legal “form” as any other) is a figure for these untethered “inscriptions of debt and value,” for this drift of value in the marketplace.’
Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, p. 17
“Bourgeois society has elaborated certain moral and juridical codes
that it is strictly forbidden to transgress. Since it likes to exploit
others, the bourgeoisie doesn’t like to be exploited. But the
Uebermensch of all kinds grow fat dipping into the bourgeois funds of
surplus value, i.e., they live directly at the expense of the
bourgeoisie. It goes without saying that they can’t place themselves
under the protection of its ethical laws. Consequently, they must create
moral principles corresponding to their way of life. Until recently
this higher category of parasitenproletariat had no global
ideology that gave it the possibility of justifying the “higher” reasons
for its rapacious actions. The justification of the rapacity of the
industrial bourgeoisie, “healthy thanks to its historical merits and
organizational capacity, without which it appears that social production
could not exist, this justification is obviously not appropriate for
the knights of higher and lower stock prices,
for the adventurers of finance, for the supermen of the stock exchange,
for the unscrupulous blackmailers of politics and journalism: in a
word, for that entire mass of parasitical proletarians that has solidly
attached itself to the bourgeois organism and which in one way or
another lives and in general doesn’t live badly at the expense of
society without giving it anything in exchange. Individual
representatives of these groups contented themselves with the
consciousness of their intellectual superiority over those who allowed
themselves to be shorn (but how could they do otherwise?). But this
group, quite large and ever growing, needed a theory that gave it the
right to dare,” given its intellectual superiority. It waited for its
apostle and found it in the person of Nietzsche. With his cynical
sincerity, his great talent, Nietzsche appeared before it, proclaiming
his “master’s morality,” his “everything is allowed,” and it praised him
to the skies…
The life of a noble being, Nietzsche teaches, is an uninterrupted
chain of adventures full of danger. Happiness doesn’t interest him, but
rather the excitement procured by risk.”
“it is not hard to understand why this is a direction poetry takes during our current moment, where the turn against conceptual work, as a turn against the coldness of a poetics that rejected subjectivity, during a time when political questions so urgently pivot on who gets to be a subject and who is locked up, out, or withheld.”
“I want to take seriously Marx’s understanding of capitalism. He treats
it as forcibly constituting, by the very organizing boundaries it erects
and then transgresses, in pursuit of increasing magnitudes of surplus,
the global collectivity, the ‘combination, due to association,’ that he
understood as the socialization of labor. The extension of Marx’s
concept of socialization to a widening range of practices deepens rather
than detracts from the power and aims of his analysis. To take the
production of surplus seriously in these other domains should not reduce
practices to mere instruments of the ends of domination where race,
gender, or sexuality are in turn nothing more than products in a
profit-taking market. Rather, the emphasis on surplus identifies what is
productive in race, gender, and sexuality such that the proprietary
claims of the dominant position in each system are exposed as emerging
only through what dominance subordinates through appropriation. The
unacknowledged dependence recurs along different dimensions of dominance
on what it subordinates through appropriation. This dependency of the
dominant is one reason that whiteness is both the hatred of and the
desire for blackness, that misogyny aspires to the rape and the
reverence of the feminine, and that homophobia is the rejection of
sameness and the need for it. In short, the appropriation not only
produces the divide between dominance and subalternity but also the
demand for further appropriation as a very condition of social
reproduction. That race, class, gender, and sexuality, as the very
materiality of social identity, are also produced in the process
indicates the practical generativity—the ongoing social capacity to
render life as history—necessary for any cultural product. Therefore, it
is not that a productionist approach assigns race, class, gender, and
sexuality the same history, political effects, or practical means.
Instead, this approach is intended to imagine the context for critical
analysis that would grant these four articulating structures
historicity, politics, and practice in relation to one another, that is,
in a manner that is mutually recognizable.” Fred Moten, In The Break
This collection was put together over a few days after the result of the EU referendum last Friday, in late June, 2016.
Some of the writing in it directly reflects that result. Some too is still in mourning after the massacre in Orlando. Some may have nothing explicit to do with recent events; it was an open invitation to submit work. But that invitation was made right on the day of the result. We do have friends making a similarly immediate ‘Brexit’ book.
This contains work by: anon., Rees Arnott-Davies, Ben Austwick, Frankie Basweld, cris cheek, Megan Clifton, Sam Cutting, Richard Dodwell, Caitlín Doherty, Emu Extraordinaire, Dominic Fox, Ben Graham, Rob Halpern, Caspar Jade Heinemann, Ben Hickman, Lisa Jayne, Antony John, Justin Katko, Laura Kilbride, Francesca Lisette, Ed Luker, Alex MacDonald, Sally Mercer, Kev Nickells, Ingrid Plum, Nat Raha, Daniel Spicer, Verity Spott, Rob Stanton, Kesh St Hewind, Keston Sutherland, Michael Tencer, Timothy Thornton, trad. (rewritten by The Black Smock Band), Dolly Turing, Karl M V Waugh, Naomi Weber, and Eley Williams.
Hopefully you’ll distribute it as widely as you can! both online, and by printing loads of copies and giving them to everybody. Rinse your work printer.
Or, if your printer doesn’t do it automatically, here are two PDFs, which you can use to print on the front and back of 13 sheets of A4, and then fold them up into a booklet.
‘Whatever the actions of human social aggregations, whether internal or external, divergent or
monolithic, the implied social contract has been validated by and through values perceived to be
upheld within language itself. Human language is the tribal continuity of expressive human
behaviour, and is marked in its very core by whatever depravity or nobility an exercise of linguistic
analysis may discover within the human record. If writers and poets think that language can
somehow resist this involvement with the worst, while claiming natural affinity with the best, then
they are guilty of a naive idealism that ought least of all to attract those who know how language
works and what it can do.’ J. H. Prynne, from ‘A Quick Riposte to Handke’s Dictum about War
and Language’.
On Friday, sat in the back seat of a small motor vehicle, careening through country lanes on a drive westwards from Brighton to Devon, I was played Beethoven’s Große Fugue for the first time in my life. It was played at the loudest volume at which the car’s sound system could bear it, any higher and the paper in the speakers would start to crackle and perforate. I was overwhelmed in the music, instantly following every rapid shift or dynamic in it. The qualities of it are now distant to me but I can remember this particularity was built around a structure that although unstable and shifting, was felt to have some sense of shape or coherency. My ear sent to my mind’s eye, with a minutiae of distance between these sense impressions, a barely felt gap between the audible and the seen, an image of being trapped on something like Rainbow Road from Mario Kart. Except, instead of being trapped on something that was exactly like Rainbow Road, a polyphonic sprawl of overlapping chroma accelerating towards you, the cacophony of Beethoven made me feel like I was trapped on a large industrial conveyor belt, that although dense and thick, had a certain lightness that made it incredibly elastic. It’s consistency was entirely contradictory then, both thick but also light, stable but also wildly variant from its stability. The movement of the music was always forwards, initially accelerating, even in its extreme moments of deceleration it was still moving somewhere on this singular tread. However, whilst this tread was mono-directional there was no necessary sense of progression or development, or, rather, any sense of progression as rapid acceleration would be swiftly undercut by a very sudden deceleration or break, which could never be just quite that. This conveyor belt could at times be felt to be incredibly stretched to the point at which it might snap, and then in the next moment that stretching could felt to be simultaneous to a slackening where the extreme points of the stretch would lose all their elasticity, like an uncoiled tape cassette. Speeding up and slowing down were felt within a markedly simultaneous temporality, whilst occurring in distinction. That is not necessarily a very apt description of the composition, of how the technical qualities of the instruments are arranged, but more a received description of the feeling the composition worked me through. Not an affect, or an emotional register where musical melody or harmony is translated by the ear and brain such that it is orientated towards an identification of a feeling, but a sense of being gripped by a piece of music such that one is wholly taken up in it and rocked by it. Not an act of translation, as there was no escape, no possibility of not understanding. Even that verb, to be rocked, infers a sense of solidity, where what it felt like one was being moved in when listening to this piece was the escalation/attenuation of the time of History itself.
