(In)finitude's Score: On André Tosel

In some sense this is a belated response to André Tosel's passing last year. When Tosel died I was only vaguely aware of his name, I may have read an essay on Spinoza or Balibar here or there, but only knew his work by reputation. It was the initial wave of responses to Tosel's death especially this interview on Revue Période that got me interested in reading Tosel. I started by reading Spinoza ou l'autre (in)finitude and have gone through the little Emancipations aujourd'hui? Études sur Marx (et Engels), Du Retour du Religieux, and Le Marxisme du 20e Siècle, with a few more on the way.

Real World Experience: On Yves Schwartz's Experience et Connaissance du Travail.

Image from the Simpsons and Frinkiac. 

Two thoughts immediately come to mind when considering Yves Schwartz's Experience et Connaissance du Travail. The first, which provides the inspiration for the image above, is the absurdity of dragging around a nearly nine hundred French book on worker's experience and knowledge. The second, somewhat more relevant thought, is that the book in some way feels like a missing element from my education. I never heard it mentioned before I dug deep into some of the writing on work coming out of France, but I know its references from Georges Canguilhem, who wrote the introduction, to Althusser, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Bourdieu. I partially understand why it never was translated or made it across the Atlantic, aside from the length it is indebted to many figures that never became part of "theory," Lucien Sève for one, but the fact that it is a book on experience written under the direction of Georges Canghuilhem should at least be of interest. Foucault famously posited a line of demarcation between philosophers of experience, existentialism and phenomenology, and philosophers of the concept, Canghuilhem, the philosophy of science. Schwartz is describing an experience that is irreducible to lived experience because it exceeds and situates life, or more to the point, living labor. 

Imaginary But For Real: On Blackkklansman

Blackkklansman has come under criticism for twisting its true story into the shape of a cop film, warping any criticism of the structural violence of racism beyond recognition in the process. As Joshua Clover writes, "It is a police film the way Get Out is a horror film, adopting genre conventions to think through a particular set of problems about blackness." Except whereas Get Out uses horror to drive home the horrors of race, Blackkklansman would seem to defuse any critical force it might have in the morality and politics of the cop film.

Conscious Organs: Toward an Anthropology of Labor Power

Presented in Rome in May 2018

Conference Draft 

Buried in the back of Volume Three of Capital, Marx puts forward a thesis of determination that is different from the familiar assertion of a base. As In Volume Marx writes, 

It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case. 

Cold Call Man: On Sorry to Bother You

There is no film this year that I have anticipated more than Sorry to Bother You. I have been a fan of Boots Riley since I first learned about The Coup years ago. I have heard about this film for years; bought the album but eschewed reading the published screenplay. The latter seemed like admitting defeat and I desperately wanted to see this film get made. The first rule of movies, at least in Hollywood, is that anticipation is the enemy of enjoyment. Of course this is usually because most films fail to meet our expectations, the trailer would have been enough; it is rare that a film not only exceeds our expectations but calls them into question. 

How Voluntary is Your Servitude? Voluntary Servitude from La Boétie to Marx

I have always been fairly comfortable with Deleuze and Guattari's assertion of the fundamental political question, drawing a line from Spinoza through Reich to their own writing. As Deleuze and Guattari write. 

"Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as if it were their own salvation? How can people possibly reach the point of shouting “More taxes! Less bread!”?…The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike"

The Primitive Accumulation of Prehistory: On the Jurassic Park films

As a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I know that there is nothing unique about this and that is precisely why I relate it. My obsession took place at a time before there was an adequate pop culture outlet for that expression. It was before the Jurassic Park films before even The Land Before Time films. So I sought out every dinosaur film I could whenever they played on the afternoon or late night movie, The Land that Time Forgot, The Last Dinosaur, Dinosaurus, etc., These films were hard to come by, and many of them are not very good at all. There is a story told in my family, a legend of sorts, of the night we all ended up in a motel while taking the yearly pilgrimage to visit the grandparents, flipped through channels only to stumble upon a showing of the  Valley of the Gwangi.  Not a great dinosaur film but one that nonetheless benefitted from the work of Ray Harryhausen. It was a different time, one defined by the scarcity of cultural products rather than their proliferation. Dinosaur films were hard to come by, and good ones less so, so a dinosaur obsessed kid took what they could.

Calling Bullshit: On Graeber's Bullshit Jobs

Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs is the kind of book I generally avoid. It is an expanded version of an essay originally published in Strike magazine. For the most part I find articles turned into books to be largely filler. The original essay or article made the point, and did so succinctly; expanding it into a book largely entails adding more and more examples with maybe a little bit of context and clarification. However, Graeber's essay was provocative enough, and close enough to my interests that I decided to read it. 

Philosophers at Work: On Alexis Cukier's Que'est-ce que le travail?

Kathi Week's book The Problem with Work opens with a paradox of sorts: political theorist should be interested in work, work makes up the most immediate and daily experience of power, hierarchy, and command, but work is considered private and social rather than political so it falls outside of the purview of political theory. A similar paradox could be said to open Alexis Cukier's book, Qu'est-ce que le travail?. Philosophers should be interested in work, work and labor are intimately implicated in not only our concepts of subjectivity and society but also transformation and change, but seldom are. Work is simultaneously too quotidian and too contingent to generate much philosophical interest.

Divisions of the Imagination: Imaginations of Division

What follows is neither the presentation I gave in Milan (in the picture above), nor the one from Rome (indicated in the picture below), but a combination of both, or more importantly, of the thoughts that emerge from the questions and conversations that followed each presentation. Why would we go to conferences after all if not to have our thoughts confronted and transformed by the ideas of others?