Friday night infodump of all the links I want to keep out of the papers.

* SciFiWire says the new Prisoner disappoints.
* Salon says it's time to bring back Marx. He went somewhere?
* NASA says that explosion last month turned up quite a bit of water on the Moon.
* Jermaine Clement says Flight of the Conchords was almost completely different—but it seems clear to me he's joking.
* And the RNC says it's not subsidizing abortions—anymore.

Tuesday night politics roundup: Steve Benen once again makes the case for health care incrementalism. Bill Clinton makes the case for not losing. The Senate probably won't pass the Stupak amendment. Open Left, noting a PPP poll suggesting Olympia Snowe can't win a Republican primary in Maine, predicts she'll switch parties; Nicholas Beaudrot concurs and suggests a Mugwump caucus. Contrary to reports, the climate bill does not make Obama dictator. Paid sick leave is a good idea. The GOP is unlikely to take back the House in a context in which it draws all its support from the South. Why employment might not fully recover until 2013. How we can destroy the filibuster. Is Marxism relevant today?

Tuesday links.

* I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. Wes Anderson interviewed in Interview. There's also a profile in this week's New Yorker, apparently, though it's not online. (via Rushmore Academy)

* Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here.

* Graduating during a recession can have a lifelong impact on your earnings.

* Also from Yglesias: Cable monopolies are killing your internet access.

* Infinite Thought has Engels on entropy.

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

The quote is from 1833's The Dialectics of Nature, and goes on to suggest a kind of eternal return:

It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

* And Boing Boing has your Scooby Doo/zombie apocalypse mashup of the day.

Karl Marx visits the Crayola factory. Via Boing Boing.

Try to imagine how wide the splatter pattern would be when Karl Marx's head explodes at the idea of a privately held corporate marketing theme park that performed a simulacrum of the labor-alienating process of industrialized manufacturing; in order to approximate a distant childhood experience of watching a television show which romanticized the original, actual alienating manufacturing process; which nostalgia is induced to stimulate consumption of the corporation's product; which is, in fact, an endless array of craft supplies for children, the very embodiment of the much-praised artisan and the educational ideal of creativity and self-expression; which all happen to be available for sampling and experimentation right here at the theme park, which by now is revealed to be a sprawling demand generation engine, and damned if you're gonna drive this far and not get something to take home besides memories and a couple of gloppy paintings made with giant rubber fish...

Great moments in Polygraph blurbs. (Thanks, Alex!)

Polygraph 21: Study, Students, Universities. Fair warning: these kids are Marxists. This issue of what is perhaps the best-run graduate student journal in the U.S. is sparked by a simple, core, observation: There are students in the university.

Verso has your video from the Marxism 2009 last week in Bloomsbury. Below: David Harvey.

All the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand. That they are not used for that purpose is to be attributed to the total mobilization of existing society against its own potential for liberation.

Every so often, when I can, I like to share snippets of what I'm reading for my exams. Yesterday it was Herbert Marcuse's "The End of Utopia," in which he argues that a functionally limitless technological horizon which finally eliminates the realm of necessity demands in turn an aesthetic-erotic revolution in values. This one's short and good. Check it out.

Even on the left the notion of socialism has been taken too much within the framework of the development of productive forces, of increasing the productivity of labor, something which was not only justified but necessary at the level of productivity at which the idea of scientific socialism was developed but which today is at least subject to discussion. Today we must try to discuss and define--without any inhibitions, even when it may seem ridiculous--the qualitative difference between socialist society as a free society and the existing society. And it is precisely here that, if we are looking for a concept that can perhaps indicate the qualitative difference in socialist society, the aesthetic-erotic dimension comes to mind almost spontaneously, at least to me. Here the notion "aesthetic" is taken in its original sense, namely as the form of sensitivity of the senses and as the form of the concrete world of human life. Taken in this way, the notion projects the convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play. It is no accident that the work of Fourier is becoming topical again among the avant-garde left-wing intelligentsia. As Marx and Engels themselves acknowledged, Fourier was the only one to have made clear this qualitative difference between free and unfree society. And he did not shrink back in fear, as Marx still did, from speaking of a possible society in which work becomes play, a society in which even socially necessary labor can be organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men.

Via Meredith, Gene Expression charts the death of theory.

Three from MeFi:

* "There's Something About Mary," the amazing story of Mary McFate, a nationally known anti-gun activist who turned out to really be Mary Lou Sapone, mole for the NRA.

* Don Hodges looks at the kill screens from Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, as well as the Defender Extra Life Bug. Bonus: The Duck Hunt kill screen.



* Another set of videos that's been hanging out neglected in my bookmarks for way too long: David Harvey's twenty-six-hour lecture series on Capital, Vol. 1.

Here's the "Playlist for Change" that will be rocking our apartment tonight as the Super Tuesday results come in. (Close readers of my Sopranos and Kinks mixes may discover some overlap.)

1. Yes We Can (Various Celebrities)



2. Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours (Stevie Wonder)

3. Revolution (The Beatles)

4. Gimme Some Truth (John Lennon)

5. The Times They Are A-Changin' (Bob Dylan)

6. This Time Tomorrow (The Kinks)

7. Imagine (John Lennon). Jaimee is under strict orders to play this song at my funeral, though she says she won't do it. It would bring the house down.

8. Think (Aretha Franklin)

9. Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) (Janis Joplin)

10. You Keep Me Hangin' On (Vanilla Fudge). Set me free, why dontcha you, babe? Get out my life, why don't you, babe? Cuz you don't really love me—you just leave me hangin' on.

11. Understanding Marx (Red Shadow). Because I have to keep my cred with the ultra-left somehow.

12. Livin' in the Future (Bruce Springsteen)

13. I Saved the World Today (Eurythmics)

14. I'm Not Like Everybody Else (The Kinks). Because my earnest support for Obama, while fervent, doesn't put me beyond irony or critical self-reflection.

15. Glad Tidings (Van Morrison)

16. Freedom (George Michael)



17. The Promised Land (Bruce Springsteen)

18. I Love You, Awesome (The Phoenix Foundation, from the Eagle vs. Shark soundtrack)

19. 1999 (Prince)

20. Rockin' in the Free World (Neil Young)

'Dermatological determinism' at infinite thØught.

The real pessimism is quietism - not doing anything because nothing can be changed, argues Bauman: "Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something. 'Don't ever console yourself that you have done everything you could, because it's not true,' says the philosopher Levinas, who believed that you recognised a moral person as someone who does not think he or she is moral enough. That is also how we recognise a just society - a just society castigates itself that there is not enough justice in our society."

I was quite taken this weekend with a chapter from Zygmunt Bauman, whom I'd never read before. Here are a few quick links to get your own Baumania started:

* 'The way we define the poor is a reflection of the kind of society we live in, argues Zygmunt Bauman'

The sight of the poor (or at least the portrayal of poverty, for the poor themselves are increasingly swept out of sight, to the periphery of cities, to ghettos and estates) keeps the non-poor at bay and in step. It thereby perpetuates their life of uncertainty. It prompts them to tolerate or bear placidly the unstoppable ‘flexibilization’ of the world and the growing precariousness of their condition. The sight incarcerates their imagination and handcuffs their will. They do not dare to imagine a different world; they are much too chary to try and change the one they have.

* 'Haunted house: the `work ethic' was bad enough, says Zygmunt Bauman. But its ghost is even worse'

We have two worlds, at opposite poles, which are becoming increasingly out of touch with each other -- much as the no-go areas of contemporary cities are carefully fenced off and bypassed by the traffic lines used for the mobility of well-off residents. The inhabitants of the First World, the relatively affluent and employed, live in a perpetual present. These people are constantly busy and always `short of time'. People marooned in the opposite world are crushed under the burden of abundant, redundant and useless time they can fill with nothing. In their time `nothing ever happens'. They do not `control `time -- but neither are they controlled by it, unlike their clocking-in, clocking-out ancestors, subject to the faceless rhythm of factory time. They can only kill time, as they are slowly killed by it.

*'The self in a consumer society'

But you can tell one kind of society from another by the dimensions along which it stratifies its members, and, like all other societies, the postmodern, consumer society is a stratified one. Those “high up” and “low down” are plotted in a society of consumers along the lines of mobility—the freedom to choose where to be. Those “high up” travel through life to their hearts’ desire and pick and choose their destinations by the joys they offer. Those “low down” are thrown out from the site they would rather stay in, and if they do not move, it is the site that is pulled from under their feet. When they travel, their destination, more often than not, is of somebody else’s choosing and seldom enjoyable; and when they arrive, they occupy a highly unprepossessing site that they would gladly leave behind if they had anywhere else to go. But they don’t. They have nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else where they are likely to be welcomed.

* 'Searching for politics in an uncertain world: Interview with Zygmunt Bauman'

Marx also explained why it is imperative for human survival to reform the capitalist way of running human affairs: that way passes no efficiency and morality tests. It is wasteful of natural and human resources and blind to the suffering it causes. Nothing has changed since Marx passed his verdict - though both the waste and the suffering have now acquired global proportions. Finally, Marx also suggested the reasons why running human affairs the capitalist way was both uneconomical and unethical. It was, he said, because our tools of action were by their capacity and their consequences social, while their management was private. We may say that today the wastefulness and immorality of the new world-wide capitalist disorder comes from the fact that our tools of action are by their capacity and their consequences global, but they are managed locally.

Another weekend, another culturemonkey post, this one about the fragility of production and the possibility of a new environmental Marxism.

Karl Marx's Capital in lithographs. Via MetaFilter.

Two new posts on culturemonkey today, one from Ryan asking what is a political film and me thinking about how such a thing might be made possible. I can assure you that these posts have nothing to do with an assignment for a class we're both taking. Nothing to do with.

Compare and contrast:

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.
—The Communist Manifesto

vs.

Hey Folks, You’re Spending My Inheritance.

The postmodernist epistemological challenge to "the Enlightenment"—its attack on master narratives and its critique of truth—also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intellectual strata of Europe and North America. Consider, for example, the mandate of the Truth Commission formed at the end of the civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and making public the truth of the recent past—attributing responsibility to state officials for specific acts and in some cases exacting retribution—appears here as the ineluctable precondition for any democratic future. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable—on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that vilalge. Making public such truths is an exemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics, and the critique of it in these contexts could serve only to aid the mystifactory and repressive powers of the regime under attack.

In our present imperial word, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy.

This passage from Hardt and Negri's Empire really leapt out at me as perhaps the difference between 1999 and 2007: the Bush administration has again taught elite intellectuals the incomparable power of truth, of knowing and of being able to name. The "postmodernist epistemological challenge to the Enlightenment" we saw reach its apex in the 1990s is possible only in a moment in which politics is viewed as essentially inconsequential—now that we know that (surprise) history isn't actually over and (surprise) it's still possible for the forces of global capital to make human life much, much worse, those old master narratives don't seem quite so destructive or misleading anymore. There's something there worth rehabilitating.

This isn't to say that we must return to some epistemology of rationalist certainty, or that we already have—quite the opposite, any movement forward will need to synthesize positivism and relativism while moving past both—but merely that a politics of utter truthlessness has no ground on which to stake a claim, much less revolutionize anything. And this ground will never ultimately be anything but ethical-moral—the concept of justice, as in every resolution in every high school debate I ever did, remains our central value, the only rhetorical space worth claiming.

I think this notion of the irreducible supremacy of justice, and the inescapable claims it makes on us, is what Derrida is getting at from the other direction when he talks about fidelity to the spirit of Marx in chapter 3 of Specters of Marx, a book I really need to read again soon:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth...

Honestly, I'm not becoming some disciple of Žižek, even if I seem to quote him a lot. But this from On Belief is really good:

Gilles Deleutze's and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus was the last great attempt to combine in a subversive synthesis the Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions. They fully recognized the revolutionary, deterritorializing impact of capitalism, which, in its inexorable dynamics, undermines all stable traditional forms of human interaction; they approached capitalism with the view that its deterritorialization is not thorough enough, that it generates now reterritorializations—a verbatim repetition of the Marxist claim that the ultimate obstacle to capitalism is capitalism itself, i.e., that capitalism unleashes a dynamics it will no longer be able to contain; far from being outdated, this claim seems to gain actuality with today's growing deadlocks of globalization in which the inherently antagonistic nature of capitalism belies its worldwide triumph. However, the problem is: is it still possible to imagine Communism (or another form of post-capitalist society) as a formation which sets free the deterritorializing dynamics of capitalism, liberating it of its inherent constraints? Marx's fundamental vision was that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitialism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises.

What Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of impossibility" of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitialism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism—if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by the obstacle dissipates... Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment. So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy—what they did not perceive is that Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the "obstacles" and antagonisms that were—as the sad experience of the "really existing capitalism" demonstrates—the only possible framework of the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity.