trashing days

Eating Chocolate Ice Cream: Reading Mayakovsky - Barbara Guest

Hence Marxism, the dialectical-historical science of the knowledge of tendency, is the interposed futuristic science of reality plus the objectively real possibility contained within it, and is wholly concerned with the goal of action. It is impossible to imagine a more illuminating contrast to any theory which is only a restatement (anamnesis) of what has already taken place, and its sundry variations. The contrast is as true of the illuminating method of Marxism as the elucidation of the unfinished matter which it illuminates. Only the horizon of the future, as Marxism brings it in to knowledge and relates it to the past as the corridor to the future, gives reality its dimension of reality.

To Posterity - Bertolt Brecht

...I riff on Smith’s claim that “nature” is effectively the ontological sphere that capitalism secretes ideologically as other than itself for the sake of accumulation. My variation is that gender, too, is an accumulation strategy...

I sometimes think narratives of poetic development can lapse into a navel-gazing account of one’s Bildung in pursuit of a private aesthetic taste. That’s antithetical to how I approach poetry, as a cultural activity coextensive but not synonymous with (say) theory. If Marxism is the name for the related series of theoretical endeavours adequate to a critique of capital, and I believe that it is, then I approach poetry as a medium capable of co-theorizing this critique.

Don’t let it bother you that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our own language is complete – whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in to it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.

[C]apitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic reproduction of the capital relation, but not reducible – either historically or logically – to that relation alone. By placing an emphasis on such configurations and assemblages, we also seek to highlight how the reproduction and competitive accumulation of capital through the exploitation of wage-labour presupposes a wide assortment of differentiated social relations that make this reproduction and accumulation possible. These relations may take numerous forms, such as coercive state apparatuses, ideologies and cultures of consent, or forms of power and exploitation that are not immediately given in or derivative of the simple capital-wage-labour relation, such as racism and patriarchy.

To say what capitalism ‘is’ runs the risk of reducing capitalism to a thing, which tends to obscure the multivalent connections in society that facilitate, structure and ultimately limit its reproduction. More specifically, it carries the implication that any given social factor contains an essence that is logically independent of other factors to which it is related. Capital ‘as a thing’ is often understood simply as ‘profit’, or an accumulated pool of money, or perhaps machinery, whose existence is independent of wider social relations. Treating capital solely as a ‘thing’ therefore tends to naturalise and eternalise capitalism.

“Race” is thus rooted in two overlapping processes of allocation and control. Past and present racial discrimination is cumulative and distributes precarity, unemployment, and informality unevenly across the economy along “race” and gender lines. But “race” is also operationalised in various state and civilian political projects of social control which classify and coerce “deserving” and “undeserving” fractions of various racial groups while determining their fitness for citizenship. Eroding the institutional separation between policing, border securitisation, and global warfare, a massively expanded security state now sends 1 in 3 black men to prison in their lifetime, deports nearly half a million undocumented immigrants annually, has exterminated anywhere from 100,000 to over a million civilians in Iraq alone, and is now gearing up for a $46 billion dollar “border surge” which includes drone surveillance and biometric exit scanning. 21st century “race” emerges from this matrix of securitisation.

Let’s venture a hypothesis: that the problem of demands is identical to the problem of composition. For any singular, consistent social agent in struggle, the essential demands of the struggle will be evident in the simple facts of who the agent of the struggle is, and what has caused this agent to form in struggle. But where a struggle manifests an unsynthesised multiplicity of social agents — where it expresses a problem of composing a unified agent of struggle — by the same token it will express a problem of demand-making. In such a situation it is not that demands are absent, for in fact there’s a multiplicity of them, but rather, that they’re not synthesised at the general level, as unifying demands of the whole movement. Thus their absence in one sense is directly related to their multiplicity in another. What should then probably be done in pursuing the question of demands in a particular movement is, rather than simply posing the question of their presence or absence, to ask what the consistency of demands, as well as their content, tells us about composition. Demands, we could say, are a direct index of the composition and texture of a movement.

"Happiness" is a fragile word. In a book he wrote about Felix Guattari, Bifo concedes that it can sound "corny and banal," to which we might add rotten, having languished in the fetid mouths of the planetary petit bourgeoisie long enough to be tainted for all time.

The soul is the clinamen of the body. It is how it falls, and what makes it fall in with other bodies. The soul is its gravity. This tendency for certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes a world. The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus and Lucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain down through the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, until a sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve—clinamen—leans bodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lasting way. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of this swerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies, rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency, the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common: neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain way of vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning or tone.

Limits - Jorge Luis Borges

Of Poor B. B. - Bertolt Brecht