Communism conference at Birkbeck

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Any Dissensians go?

I came across a report here:

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=732

Which included this final paragraph:

"All this was symbolized at the very end of the conference. As everyone was getting ready to leave, Zizek asked us to all stand up and sing “The Internationale”. Almost nobody did (there were a few people in one corner singing it, but they couldn’t be heard above the general hubbub). In my case — and I suspect this held for a large majority of the hundreds of people in the auditorium — I would have liked to sing “The Internationale”, but I couldn’t — because, although I am vaguely familiar with the melody, I do not know the words."

I am not sure what to make of this image.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I am not sure what to make of this image.

probably that the kinds of ppl who'd go to such a conference - academics & intellectuals, worldly - are precisely the kind of ppl for whom big, crude symbols like the Internationale have little resonance. also that, & no offense, for most of them their connection to Communism (as borne out in the summary of the conference) is very much on a theoretical plane & has very little to do with anything as concrete & physical as the singing of anthems. I reckon Zizek was taking the piss anyway? tho maybe not.

Actually that summary was quite depressing. not that I'm a Marxist, but I dunno, it seems sad to see it reduced to such straits, a bunch of academics sitting around debating the most abstruse nonsense. and at precisely the moment when capitalism is, if not failing, then at least staggering badly & some ppl might actually be receptive their message. if they had one, of course - surely this has been brought up in other threads, but it seems as if being a Communist these days has much more to do with defining oneself (mostly in negative terms, as in what you're opposed to) than attempting to bring about Communism.
 

swears

preppy-kei
I think if communism is ever acheived, it'll come through years of slow, gradual, hard-won gains by the public, from our current liberal democracy, through social democracy to socialism to actual communism. If at all. This is preferable to a "meet the new boss..." revolution scenario.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Actually that summary was quite depressing.

Personally, I am beginning to find it all darkly comic. I mean the whole show... The vision of a conference room filled with graduate students and academics singing the international just seems so... I don't know how to put this.. this complete disconnection from reality, political reality, the reality of politics presented in the guise of The Most Important Issue Which Today Faces Us. These differences, political disagreements, very, very, very precise... Eurocentrism, the nature of the relationship between politics and the economy, transubstantiation, consubstantiation. The Necessity of Strict Discipline being insisted upon from the podium (this message must now be spread!)... other matters of pressing importance... What does it all mean?

What I am trying to imagine is a new international, led by Zizek and Badiou, commanding the allegiances of millions of disciplined cadres all over the world, and then finally, one day, having been given their orders, moving as one to take the capital.
 

vimothy

yurp
Surely if the twin poles of communism are universalism and egalitarianism, and given that confiscating wealth from rich westerners and giving it to the developing world poor is both unlikely and ultimately pointless, communists should be discussing (creating) communism as a system of governance and production. The conference reads like pure farce, like monks gathering to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I kind of wish I'd been there.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
I think this:


Jean-Luc Nancy will be present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.


Is quite avant-garde.
 

vimothy

yurp
K Punk's piece in Frieze had an interesting section on Terry Eagleton:

Shamelessly playing to the middlebrow gallery, offering theory-sceptics an emollient antidote to theoretical abstraction, the implicit message of Eagleton’s presentation was clear: no need to think, no need to bother your heads with all this difficult French stuff.

The difference between Eagleton and the likes of Badiou, Rancière and Antonio Negri was evident in body language and mode of delivery as much as in the content of what they said. In their different ways, Negri and Žižek had the gestural animation of the militant intellectual rather than the complacent posturings of the career academic.​
The militant intellectual in full flow:
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
This is an unbelievably funny avant-garde theater piece. The woman next to him clearly appreciates this.

I think I like Zizek once more. He is, in the end, incomparable.

Imagine if the question was: Why does this man have an audience? Imagine he himself does not know Imagine, he is trying to figure it out.

Or alternatively. Imagine that he knows perfectly well. And this is all a gigantic joke. With no punch line.
 
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vimothy

yurp
According to the comments section, the tape stops just before our hero tries to lead the crowd in a chorus of "The Internationale". A great shame.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Personally, I am beginning to find it all darkly comic. I mean the whole show...What does it all mean?

well I dunno if it really means anything - aside from the fact that Communist philosophers in Europe have so little impact on current (& presumably) future events &, more importantly, are so content with that situation - I mean clearly even most Communists know it's a joke, the bitter pill of defeat/disillusionment having been replaced with a knowing ironic wink - they're content enough to go to grimly absurd/hilarious conferences & debate things like "the relevance of the communist hypothesis" with half-straight faces, complete with droll/wild-eyed references to the Jacobins & what have you.

This line by Zizek made me laugh out loud:
We must do, you must do what Lenin did in 1915, after the war broke out, after th failure of the Social Democratic parties. He went to the library and started to read Hegel’s Logic.
Sure he's making an allegorical point but still...surely the Rome burn/Nero fiddling imagery is just too rich...I especially enjoy the implication that the Russian Revolution came about b/c Lenin read Hegel...

I think I like Zizek once more. He is, in the end, incomparable.

Oh yes. I am a huge Zizek fan in this sense. his whole "look! I am a Stalinist rockstar" vibe, that he is not afraid of being a grotesque buffoon, even some of his bewildering dances across the face of logic. anyway of course the absuridty of Zizek is only entertaining, as he knows better than anyone, b/c the stakes are so low, there is no Terror looming behind all his preening. I think you are right that it is much more useful to view it as a kind of performance art Which perhaps raises interesting questions about the relation between philosophy & entertainment. or something. anyway this Terry Eagleton quote nails it I reckon:

Slavoj seems to be a philosopher of the impossible and would like to do impossible things as far as possible…’

"Philosopher of the impossible"...(ironically) sounds so Paris 1968...
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
oh & a brief anecdote about anthems - & not get to cute with it but...

every EZLN village I've been to (which admittedly is only a handful) everyone knew the Himno Zapatista...tho that's not impressive of itself as it's essentially their national anthem. it was more that it struck me that people would sing it constantly, especially in the more remote villages - I remember one village where literally everyone in the village (there were only 7 or 8 families tho) would gather every night to sing it before going to sleep...&, not to romanticize, but the way in which they sang it, reverently, it's well-named as a hymn...

of course it also has that kind of Internationale vibe, you can kind of glimpse the vanguardist roots of the original Maoist intellectuals (Marcos & pals before they met any indigenous ppl) who came to Chiapas in the 70s, with it's talk of the Zapatista fighter seeing the horizon ahead, advancing in struggle, "the peasants & the workers"...
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Let me say something else while I'm here. A question, really, more then a comment, and not a question that I am sure I know the answer to. Imagine you are an activist, who desires to instrument certain changes in political structures, the way a society functions. What is your first step, what do you do? And what is the role of philosophy, theory, and labels, in what you do?

Let's say you armed, for example, with the concepts that Zizek and Badiou and the others at Birkbeck have given you. And not only the concepts, but also the manners and stances, the positions and takes, the demeanors and attitudes, which also themselves confer certain ways of thinking about politics, how it does, about political change, how it is achieved. What is your first step, what do you do? Where do you focus your energies?

The critique of this conference - and not only this conference - that I see, and which I read from the Kafila reports, is that it is not really equipping people for understanding the true contours of their situations, for understanding how to negotiate with those situations, in order to change those situations.

It seems sterile to me, more to do with bulwarking patterns of militant self-regard then activating lines of flight (Deleuze) or opening up productive avenues for exploration and negotiation - avenues that seem to me to require a profound local knowledge, and the tools for interpreting that knowledge, rather than gigantic abstractions and banners, or the semantic politics of the academy... This is my understanding, which is doubtless very flawed and partial, and, as Craner says, shit-stirring.
 

vimothy

yurp
Josef -- What is the Badiou piece referred to as kick-starting the conference (something about the "communist hypothesis")?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think it's important for communists to develop an understanding of how capitalism works (and fails).

So given the complexities of the era it's hardly surprising that some heavy theorising will be going on.

However I think there is an tendency towards turning the manufacture of theory (and its consumption) into a specialised discipline all of its own, one which can (in some instances) be increasingly remote from any actual involvement in struggles.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

The flipside of this coin is the activist mentality, where young people hare around doing stuff all the time, but not reflecting on where it is getting them, how it fits into the bigger picture.

So it's important to have a combination of theory and practise -> praxis. (This is a cliche, right?)

For me a lot of this Zizek/Badiou stuff is just too complex and I find it impossible to relate it to my every day experiences and political activity.

That could be because it is in fact a waste of time, intellectual masturbation. Or it may be that I just haven't found a use for it yet (or am too thick to) and that other people who are engaged in political activity have found it incredibly inspiring and useful.

I am not qualified to say which it is.
 

vimothy

yurp
Cheers. I like the way the conference is called, "the idea of communism" -- read as communism as the subject, rather than the object, of the idea. Zizek would be the object, obviously. He should go on tour, like a rock star. I suspect there's quite a market for Leninist post-ironic cult of the leader revivalism: lights, smoke machines, lots of Alec Empire*, drunken teenagers snogging... I'd definitely go.

EDIT: Actually, Empire is too obvious. It should be baseline house.
 
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