padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I was originally thinking post modernism as Jameson's 'cultural logic of late capital,' so social atomization, low point of collective power, high point of labor alienation, all consuming nature of the market and etc. Deleuze is always talking, in ways I haven't completely parsed through yet, that the era were in was always just on the horizon, always pushed back and resisted against by previous societies.
that's all very interesting as well as helpful, thx

that's exactly why I'm trying to acquire, bit by bit, a real grounding in this stuff, to have those kinds of concepts casually in my grasp instead so I can spend less time feeling like I'm groping around half-blind in a murky twilight

the Deleuze point especially - does he draw on any specific historic examples and/or make comparisons?

because I do have a bit of a history background and it certainly jives with what I know about history - the long record of peasant rebellion, for example, from famous large-scale events like 1381, the Jacquerie, and Engels' favorite, the German Peasants War, to lower-scale resistance to social control that was part of the fabric of medieval life. the multivolume history of the 100 Years War that I'm (still) reading frequently returns to the extreme difficulty of the French and English monarchies in getting their subjects to pay taxes to fund their war efforts (nervos belli, pecuniam infinitum), especially for things that weren't an immediate local concern. and Foucault's historical work is clearly related - trying to uncover how we arrived at where are, how that resistance was subdued. there was a large shift in historiography beginning in the 60s toward social history (or as Marxists put it "people's history"), preceded by the French Annales School, which was a definite influence on Foucault's approach to history.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
anyway, what I'm trying to get, clearly inefficiently, is what postmodern fragments predating postmodernism might say about what the postmodern condition shares more with the more general human condition, insomuch as generalities can be made about the human condition

Velasquez idk, but Diderot I think did sense something of "the easiest way to run a state" or the path of least resistance to social control

tho he's not the guy who came up with the famous "last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" line (that was the atheist priest - yes - Jean Meslier, another fascinating character, who prefigures the school of suspicion by a century and a half) he did write his own version of it, and he was deeply suspicious in general of all social control - Voltaire publicly disowned him for being too radical, most of his writings couldn't published til his death, etc

Spinoza is someone else you could look at - he was intrinsically, wholly opposed to any form of control that limited intellectual freedom, which as the rare philosopher who lived up to his philosophy caused him no end of problems in his life - but is exactly what makes him a hero for Deleuze (or at least it seems that way reading his Spinoza monograph).
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
or, succinctly - what does prior resistance tell us about ways to (successfully) resist now?

can they help us escape the trap of the post-postmodern condition - postmodern realism, to borrow from/paraphrase the late great k-punk

it seems to me like that's precisely what Foucault's historical work is ultimately concerned with
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
the Deleuze point especially - does he draw on any specific historic examples and/or make comparisons?

They're not too often to make specific examples and I haven't completely gotten it yet. Interestingly enough the only specific example I've found briefly riffling through it is about state resistance:

'When Etienne Balazs asks why capitalism wasn't born in China in the thirteenth century, when all the necessary scientific and technical conditions nevertheless seemed to be present, the answer lies in the State, which closed the mines as soon as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient, and which retained a monopoly or a narrow control over commerce (the merchant as functionary)."

Theyre talking about capitalism and not specifically postmodernism, but I think its a fair substitute as they spend the book clearly hinting at the financialized late capitalism of post modernism.

I believe what their getting at can be applied to what David Graeber says about debt though (which maps on to what your saying about peasant rebellion re: burning of debt and tax records), as they talk a bit about the debt based society of primitive social relations. That debt is at the heart of its productive power, it creates new codes for social relations that in turn create new avenues for social/cultural production and spirals on from there. States and peasants alike have an interest in keeping a level of codependence between individual agents as complete atomization takes power out of everyone's hands:
In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes.
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I believe what their getting at can be applied to what David Graeber says about debt though
definitely - I was actually going to mention Graeber, whose work on debt was really the culmination of his omnipresent concern with the struggle between imposition of and resistance to authority - really in the same sense of Foucault tho he differed sharply with Foucault on the knowledge/power relationship (he thought the opposite, that structural inequality enforced by violence or the threat of violence creates ignorance, as if you can just enforce your rule with violence it obviates the need for mutual understanding - i.e. Weber's definition of the state as "the human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory").

to return to my example, it's interesting how well it maps back onto Foucault, Deleuze, Graeber

that is, those major peasant revolts of the 14th century - the Jacquerie in France, and 1381 (Wat Tyler etc) in England - were tied (unsurprisingly) to the respective monarchies' efforts to maintain social control over peasants in direct relation to the ongoing war - that is, raising taxes, enforced labor (building fortifications, repairing war damage, etc), and freezing wages (which rose sharply due to labor shortage in the wake of the Black Death) to help the aristocracy and the church, the classes that funded and in the case of the aristocracy, actually fought the wars. so you could look at those large-scale revolts as a breakdown of that codependence between state and peasant and increase in atomization - and indeed the 1350s in France - the Jacquerie is 1358 - were marked by large-scale, devastating breakdown of civil authority and social order in France after 20 years of war exacerbated by plague, poorly understood long-term economic problems, and bad leadership (the medieval king was a primus inter pares and the success of his kingship was largely dependent learning to work within the limits that constrained him - Edward III was usually good at that, French kings of the 1330s-50s mostly weren't).
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
and I assume you could find many other similar examples if you looked at them closely enough

I guess the question is, if the conditions of "the cultural logic of late capitalism" make very difficult or impossible the methods by which previous societies have resisted, what is left? it feels relevant to mention to recuperation here - something that is predicated on vast information technologies, the proliferation of images, etc. and again, looking at prior social conditions to see what worked. tbh it seems like collective (often violent) action is almost the only thing, or - as per that example of China and mines - resistance by the powerful for their own reasons of self-interest.
 

version

Well-known member
On the topic of a lack of grand narratives, no objective truth etc, I found I went through a phase of being so distrusting of things I would read they'd become more or less meaningless. I could read some generic Reuters report and the words would carry so little weight they may as well have been incomprehensible squiggles. I'd read a sentence about Macron and Merkel meeting in Brussels to discuss a certain topic and find myself questioning whether they did actually meet, whether that was where they met, whether that was what was actually discussed and what the benefits would be of claiming it went the way the report was claiming it did.

I'm still skeptical of more or less everything, but over time I've found myself more readily believing things and being able to take them at face value. The awareness of potentially being misled probably won't ever go away, but there are things I think are more or less likely and I'm not as uncomfortable with that as I once was. I don't have the same sense of everything being interchangeable because I can't personally verify it.

The point being, I wonder whether things will inevitably settle back into some form of (relatively) cohesive order. Surely the current mode of engagement's unsustainable? People are completely frazzled. I'm sure even the most diehard Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists can feel it. The exhaustion of being in perpetual conflict with (what's left of) consensus reality. Everyone needs their "piece of fresh land".
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
On the topic of a lack of grand narratives, no objective truth etc, I found I went through a phase of being so distrusting of things I would read they'd become more or less meaningless. I could read some generic Reuters report and the words would carry so little weight they may as well have been incomprehensible squiggles. I'd read a sentence about Macron and Merkel meeting in Brussels to discuss a certain topic and find myself questioning whether they did actually meet, whether that was where they met, whether that was what was actually discussed and what the benefits would be of claiming it went the way the report was claiming it did.

I'm still skeptical of more or less everything, but over time I've found myself more readily believing things and being able to take them at face value. The awareness of potentially being misled probably won't ever go away, but there are things I think are more or less likely and I'm not as uncomfortable with that as I once was. I don't have the same sense of everything being interchangeable because I can't personally verify it.

The point being, I wonder whether things will inevitably settle back into some form of (relatively) cohesive order. Surely the current mode of engagement's unsustainable? People are completely frazzled. I'm sure even the most diehard Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists can feel it. The exhaustion of being in perpetual conflict with (what's left of) consensus reality. Everyone needs their "piece of fresh land".
Part of the reason I am slowly building a general trust, rather that being skeptical of every fiber of the cosmos under the jurisdiction of human will, is that I am beginning to believe many of the people pulling the major strings aren't as smart, and their strings aren't as important major, as such skepticism tends to imply.

I mean, unless there is a cabal/board of superintelligent yogis that are able to orchestrate energy flows through every conceivable human discipline and sphere, I just don't think even the creme of our crop is up to the task. Even the exo-legal and seemingly fanatically neoliberal Eurogroup, according to Yanis Varoufakis, doesn't seem to have a clue.

Even being an economic maestro isn't enough - you'd need to be a maestro in virtually every conceivable category in order to administer systems of the kind of complexity our cosmos has reached that unfolds around us.

So in a way that helps me start believing things, rather than getting hung up on the possibility that it could all be part of an elaborate interdisciplinary, intercorporational, intergovernmental orchestrated system.

I just don't think they are worth the capital "T".
 

version

Well-known member
Totally, although it's not just that. I'm also talking about the acknowledgment of relative levels of manipulation. It can be tempting to opt out and fall into "both sides" thinking once you realise every source is unreliable, but I don't think that's something you can keep up. You naturally look for anchors and eventually start to feel confident in trusting some things and not others. I can acknowledge the fact the New York Times will lie, obfuscate, pander and embellish and still feel confident they're broadly correct when it comes to Trump and what sort of person he is.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Would you say its just a matter of thinking from the perspective of whatever party/voice is issuing the information? In the case of the NYT, I would agree, and I would think that their motive is, perhaps, catering to upper-middle class liberal readers. I get their newsletter, and when I read through it I get the sense that they are tempering their partisanship, at least to some degree, with journalistic neutrality. But then again, I'm really not familiar with the NYT. That said, you really just need to read between the lines.

I don't think I'm not sure i get your "both sides" point. You mean just playing some kind of perpetual dialectical two-headed advocate, and that one can only do this for so long before they curl up onto their piece of fresh land? Although I'd imagine its usually stale land.
 

version

Well-known member
Would you say its just a matter of thinking from the perspective of whatever party/voice is issuing the information?
With Trump, I think it's just a matter of looking at him. He's so openly untrustworthy you don't even need anyone to tell you he is. The back and forth with the media never really puts him in a position of authority, it just muddies the water enough to undermine the credibility of anyone who criticises him. It doesn't work to convince you of anything other than that you don't conclusively know what's going on.
I'm not sure i get your "both sides" point. You mean just playing some kind of perpetual dialectical two-headed advocate, and that one can only do this for so long before they curl up onto their piece of fresh land? Although I'd imagine its usually stale land.
Yeah, essentially. You can't maintain that sense of "every interpretation is equally valid".
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
My caveat, as of now, is that all opinions/interpretations are valid, but some are more informed, less vacuum-grown, less parochial.

The "all are valid" argument is a sort of prototype for a study of ideology that is grounded in physics, which I haven't seen yet. That is, if a psycho-neuronal formation occurs, it is valid by virtue of its having occurred. Valid would just mean evidently possible.

Largely a semantic point on "valid". Whether that means all opinions/interpretations ought to be treated the same way - I don't think it does. We can respect an opinion without basing policy on it.

I'd be interested in working out, or looking into, sensibilities and outlooks that involve treating everyone, perhaps everything, with respect. It would seemingly be a step up from treating everyone/everything with love. But that, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily mean we need to ignore how situationally optimal a given opinion is.

edit: so I would be led to believe that within the set of all valid opinions on a given topic, having defined valid as above, there must be some attractor that the distribution orbits around, some optimal state that only gets approached, never reached.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah, essentially. You can't maintain that sense of "every interpretation is equally valid".

So I think I agree with what you're saying, just that I have semantic caveats that spare my point from your negation.

That is, if you're saying that not all interpretations are equally, or even equivalently, robust, then yeah I think I'd agree.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
But personally thats a dangerous thing for me to just believe, which is why I'm tip-toeing around it.

Part of the reason I choose to insist that all opinions are valid. In the interest of preventing an elitism from taking hold, assuming it hasn't already. Aiming for 100% subsumption of all possible opinions/beliefs.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
re: debt

Watching a Yanis Varoufakis talk, and he said something that really clicked with me, that debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity: unpleasant, but absolutely necessary.

The negative half, the half that gets people moving away from it, and toward the positive half.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I guess the question is, if the conditions of "the cultural logic of late capitalism" make very difficult or impossible the methods by which previous societies have resisted, what is left? it feels relevant to mention to recuperation here - something that is predicated on vast information technologies, the proliferation of images, etc. and again, looking at prior social conditions to see what worked. tbh it seems like collective (often violent) action is almost the only thing, or - as per that example of China and mines - resistance by the powerful for their own reasons of self-interest.

think the difference with prior social conditions could be that they did actually stand to collapse, i.e. the dire conditions could become impetus to mass collective action, where as were at the point of that classic socialist problem where work for many is unnecessary and wealth is comparatively endless and the state can forever stave off the collapse point that would motivate counter action. Covid feels like a feeling out of our tolerance here, perfect time to find out exactly when and how to intervene on a disgruntled population.

On a theoretical note I've read from a few that do-nothing politics is the only option we have left- Zizek's Barteby politics, Deleuze's Idiotism (as far as I know neither are all that specifically prescriptive though), Pynchon took a similar late career turn by redefining the struggle as the search for places outside the process rather than internally toiling against it. So mass collective action to opt out rather than fight back. Who knows what that looks like in practice though.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
on a basic level there is a cold scientific eurocentricity in analysing for instance the development of capitalism in England and France... Let's call it an econocentrism.

Then there is a eurocentrism of values, of 'western civilisation', culture, behaviour, and so on.

postmodernists and their critics confuse the two and serve up a mouldy outdated stew.

Without wanting to bring class into it again, the concern with cultural particularity is generally the concern of those who are raised within the academic system to eventually aim at professional status. For those of us outside it especially those concentrated in densely populated areas fixed cultural gradiants have already disintegrated and are in flux.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
in that sense I call it an accelerated modernism more than a postmodernism. The (post) in postmodernism by nature indicates a totalised enclosed prison. which is why you would never talk about post-renaissance pre-romanticism semi-classicalism.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the existence of doubt and existential anxiety are in themselves a refutation of universalism

this is what Camus, de Beauvoir, etc were trying to reconcile

yes but are you talking about ontological universals within the world of forms/world spirit/whatever, or moral 'universals?' The two are different, and the latter has yet to be formed.

Kant tried, of course, with the categorical imperative.
1) Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
1.5) Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.
2) Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
3) Thus the third practical principle follows [from the first two] as the ultimate condition of their harmony with practical reason: the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.

As it is apparent this is what secular law strives for, but is unable to fully realise due to inherent contradictions within the social relations of society. So according to Kant 1) 2) inherently forbids slavery. You can't say oh I don't see slave as human whereas I see myself as human so therefore I am an end but the slave is not. I mean, you could, but then you would have to accept as a slave owner that others have every right to view you as not part of humanity, which would trap you in an insoluble contradiction.

Unless of course you believe we are always in a Hobbesian state of nature with no reciprocal social contract governing us. I'm not sure how that could be defended. The frenchman can kill the arab but he will ultimately cary responsibility for it, whether there is a cosmic (religious) judgment about it is pretty irrelevant.
 
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luka

Well-known member
On the topic of a lack of grand narratives, no objective truth etc, I found I went through a phase of being so distrusting of things I would read they'd become more or less meaningless. I could read some generic Reuters report and the words would carry so little weight they may as well have been incomprehensible squiggles. I'd read a sentence about Macron and Merkel meeting in Brussels to discuss a certain topic and find myself questioning whether they did actually meet, whether that was where they met, whether that was what was actually discussed and what the benefits would be of claiming it went the way the report was claiming it did.

one of my cousins was the first person to introduce me to this degree of scepticicsm. she mentioned a story that was in the news about puritanical Jews ripping down bikini adverts in Israel. "Why do you think they out that story put now?" she asked me
and when I said, I dunno, cos it just happened? she looked at me like I was a total naive simpleton. that's when I realised she was working from the position that all mass media is nothing more than a programming system, nothing appears there without a purpose.
 
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