babyfinland posted:
i posted the only thing of substance in this thread and no one has commented on it whatsoever, this is why its impossible to take any of this seriously even at the basic level of conversation

oh holy shit get over yourself

babyfinland posted:

We can now try to list in the form of theses the essential characteristics that our analysis of the providential paradigm have brought to light. These define something like an ontology of acts of governance:

1. Providence (governance) is that through which theology and philosophy attempted to confront the division of classical ontology into two separate realities: being and praxis, transcendent good and immanent good, theology and oikonomia. It appears as a machine directed toward rearticulating the two fragments into the gubernatio dei, into the divine governance of the world.

2. It represents, in the same sense and in the same measure, the attempt to reconcile the Gnostic division between a God foreign to the world and a God who governs, which Christian theology had inherited, through the “economic” articulation of the Father and the Son. In the Christian oikonomia, the creator God confronts a corrupted and foreign nature, which the savior God, to whom the governance of the world has been given, must redeem and save, through a kingdom that is not, however, “of this world.” The price that the trinitarian overcoming of the Gnostic division between two divinities must pay is the substantial foreignness of the world. The Christian governance of the world has, consequently, the paradoxical figure of the immanent governance of a world that is and must remain foreign.

א This “Gnostic” structure, which the theological oikonomia has transmitted to modern governmentality, reaches its extreme point in the paradigm of governance that the great Western powers (in particular the US) always try to realize on both a local and global scale. Whether it is a matter of the breaking down of preexisting constitutional forms or the imposition, through military occupation, of constitutional models considered democratic on peoples to whom these models appear to be impracticable, in every case the essential thing is that a region — and, at the limit, the entire globe — is governed while remaining completely foreign.

The tourist, that is, the final reincarnation of the Christian peregrinus in terra, is the planetary figure of this irreducible foreignness to the world. It is, in this sense, a figure whose “political” significance is consubstantial with the dominant governmental paradigm, just as the peregrinus was the figure corresponding to the providential paradigm. The pilgrim and the tourist are, that is, the collateral effects of one and the same “economy” (in its theological or secularized version).

3. The providential machine, while being unitary, is articulated, for this reason, on two distinct planes or levels: transcendence/immanence, general providence/special providence (or fate), primary cause/secondary cause, intellectual knowledge/praxis. The two levels are strictly correlated, in such a way that the first founds, legitimates, and renders possible the second and the second realizes concretely in the chain of causes and effects the general decisions of the divine mind. The governance of the world is what results from this functional correlation.

4. The paradigm of the act of governance, in its pure form, is, consequently, the collateral effect. Insofar as it is not directed to a particular end but derives, as a concomitant effect, from a general law and economy, the act of governance represents a zone of undecidability between the general and the particular, between the calculated and the non-willed. This is its “economy.”

5. In the providential machine transcendence is never given by itself and separate from the world, as in Gnosticisim, but is always in relation to immanence; this latter, on the other hand, is never truly such, because it is thought always as an image or reflection of the transcendent order. Correspondingly, the second level appears as execution (executio) of what was arranged and ordained (ordinatio) on the first. The division of powers is consubstantial with the machine.

6. The ontology of acts of governance is a vicarious ontology, in the sence that, within the economic paradigm, every power has a vicarious character, acts in another’s place. This means that there is not a “substance,” but only an “economy” of power.

7. It is precisely the distinction and correlation of the two levels, of the primary and secondary causes, of the general economy and the particular economy, that guarantees that governance is not a despotic power, which does violence to the liberty of the creature; it presupposes, to the contrary, the liberty of the governed, which is demonstrated through the operation of the secondary causes.

It should already be clear in what sense it can be said that the providential apparatus (which is itself only a reformulation and development of the theological oikonomia) contains something like the epistemological paradigm of modern governance. It is known that, in the history of law , a doctrine of governance and public administration (not to speak of administrative law which, as such, is a typically modern creation) takes a long time to take form. But well before the jurists began to develop its first elements, the philosophers and theologians had already developed its model in the doctrine of the providential gubernatio of the world. Providence and fate, with the train of notions and concepts in which they are articulated (ordinatio / executio; reign and governance; immediate and mediated governance; primi agentes / agentes inferiores; primary act / collateral effects, etc.) are not only, in this sense, theologico-philosophical concepts, but categories of law and politics.

The modern State inherits, in fact, both aspects of the theological machine of the governance of the world, and presents itself equally as providence-State and as destiny-State. Through the distinction between legislative or sovereign power and executive or governance power, the modern State assumes on itself the double structure of the governmental machine. It puts on by turns the regal vestments of providence, which legislates in a transcendent or universal way, but leaves the creature it takes care of free, and the suspicious and ministerial vestments of fate, which carries out in detail the providential dictates and forces reluctant individuals into the implacable connection of immanent causes and effects that their own nature has contributed to determining. The economico-providential paradigm is, in this sense, the paradigm of democratic governance, just as the theologico-political is the paradigm of absolutism.

It’s not surprising, in this sense, that the collateral effect appears ever more frequently to be consubstantial with every act of governance. What the government aims at can be, by its very nature, reached only as a collateral effect, in a zone in which general and particular, positive and negative, calculated and unforeseen tend to be superimposed onto each other. To govern means to allow to be produced the concomitant particular effects of a general “economy” that would remain in itself entirely ineffective, but without which no governance would be possible. It is not so much that the effects (Governance) depend on being (Reign), but being consists rather in its effects: such is the vicarious and effectual ontology that defines acts of governance. And when the providential paradigm, at least in its transcendent aspect, begins to decline, providence-State and destiny-State tend progressively to become identified in the figure of the State of modern law, in which the law regulates administration and the administrative apparatus applies and carries out the law. But, even in this case, the decisive element remains that to which, from the very beginning, the machine as a whole has been destined: the oikonomia, that is, the governance of human beings and of things. The economico-governmental vocation of contemporary democracies is not an incident along the way, but is an integral part of the theological inheritance of which they are trustees.

http://itself.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/kotsko-notes-over-il-regno-e-la-gloria1.pdf

animedad posted:

babyfinland posted:
where are the other posts of worth in the thread

tpaine's. his posts are like therapy for clown college dropouts

that goes without saying, tpaines posts belong to a heavenly spirit world that transcends thread id numbers

AmericanNazbro posted:
i'm going to cry anyways it's therapeutic and as an impotent human being, that's all i can really do anyways.

lital worm

GoldenLionTamarin posted:

has anyone said incrementalism yet? because thats the answer

Franz Borkenau, reflecting on the defeat of the Spanish revolution, states: "In this tremendous contrast with previous revolutions one fact is reflected. Before these latter years, counter-revolution usually depended upon the support of reactionary powers, which were technically and intellectually inferior to the forces of revolution. This has changed with the advent of fascism. Now, every revolution is likely to meet the attack of the most modern, most efficient, most ruthless machinery yet in existence. It means that the age of revolutions free to evolve according to their own laws is over." This was written more than thirty years ago (The Spanish Cockpit, London, 1937; Ann Arbor, 1963, pp. 288–289) and is now quoted with approval by Chomsky (op. cit., p. 310). He believes that American and French intervention in the civil war in Vietnam proves Borkenau's prediction accurate, "with substitution of 'liberal imperialism' for 'fascism.'" I think that this example is rather apt to prove the opposite.

The fact is that the gap between state-owned means of violence and what people can muster by themselves—from beer bottles to Molotov cocktails and guns—has always been so enormous that technical improvements make hardly any difference. Textbook instructions on "how to make a revolution" in a step-by-step progression from dissent to conspiracy, from resistance to armed uprising, are all based on the mistaken notion that revolutions are "made." In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only as long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is, as long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to use their weapons. When this is no longer the case, the situation changes abruptly. Not only is the rebellion not put down, but the arms themselves change hands—sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution, within a few hours.

]Only after this has happened, when the disintegration of the government in power has permitted the rebels to arm themselves, can one speak of an "armed uprising," which often does not take place at all or occurs when it is no longer necessary. Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience—to laws, to rulers, to institutions—is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.

Where power has disintegrated, revolutions are possible but not necessary. We know of many instances when utterly impotent regimes were permitted to continue in existence for long periods of time—either because there was no one to test their strength and reveal their weakness or because they were lucky enough not to be engaged in war and suffer defeat. Disintegration often becomes manifest only in direct confrontation; and even then, when power is already in the street, some group of men prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.

Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything. The end of war—end taken in its twofold meaning—is peace or victory; but to the question And what is the end of peace? there is no answer. Peace is an absolute, even though in recorded history periods of warfare have nearly always outlasted periods of peace. Power is in the same category; it is, as they say, "an end in itself." (This, of course, is not to deny that governments pursue policies and employ their power to achieve prescribed goals. But the power structure itself precedes and outlasts all aims, so that power, far from being the means to an end, is actually the very condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of the means-end category.) And since government is essentially organized and institutionalized power, the current question What is the end of government? does not make much sense either. The answer will be either question-begging—to enable men to live together—or dangerously Utopian—to promote happiness or to realize a classless society or some other nonpolitical ideal, which if tried out in earnest cannot but end in some kind of tyranny.

Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy. The common treatment of these two words as synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the current equation of obedience and support. Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate.

Power and violence, though they are distinct phenomena, usually appear together. Wherever they are combined, power, we have found, is the primary and predominant factor. The situation, however, is entirely different when we deal with them in their pure states—as, for instance, with foreign invasion and occupation. We saw that the current equation of violence with power rests on government's being understood as domination of man over man by means of violence. If a foreign conqueror is confronted by an impotent government and by a nation unused to the exercise of political power, it is easy for him to achieve such domination. In all other cases the difficulties are great indeed, and the occupying invader will try immediately to establish Quisling governments, that is, to find a native power base to support his dominion. The head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely nonviolent resistance of the Czechoslovak people is a textbook case of a confrontation between violence and power in their pure states. But while domination in such an instance is difficult to achieve, it is not impossible. Violence, we must remember, does not depend on numbers or opinions, but on implements, and the implements of violence, as I mentioned before, like all other tools, increase and multiply human strength. Those who oppose violence with mere power will soon find that they are confronted not by men but by men's artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents. Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi's enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy—Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England—the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint. Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its "solution" of the Czechoslovak problem-just as it was the shrinking power of European imperialism that became manifest in the alternative between decolonization and massacre. To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.

It has often been said that impotence breeds violence, and psychologically this is quite true, at least of persons possessing natural strength, moral or physical. Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power—in 1968 during the Democratic convention in Chicago we could watch this process on television75—and that violence itself results in impotence. Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place. The means, the means of destruction, now determine the end—with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power.

Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Terror is not the same as violence; it is, rather, the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. It has often been noticed that the effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization. Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before the full force of terror can be let loose. This atomization—an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies—is maintained and intensified through the ubiquity of the informer, who can be literally omnipresent because he no longer is merely a professional agent in the pay of the police but potentially every person one comes into contact with. How such a fully developed police state is established and how it works—or, rather, how nothing works where it holds sway—can now be learned in Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, which will probably remain one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature and certainly contains the best documentation on Stalin's regime in existence.76 The decisive difference between totalitarian domination, based on terror, and tyrannies and dictatorships, established by violence, is that the former turns not only against its enemies but against its friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. And this is also the moment when power disappears entirely. There exist now a great many plausible explanations for the de-Stalinization of Russia—none, I believe, so compelling as the realization by the Stalinist functionaries themselves that a continuation of the regime would lead, not to an insurrection, against which terror is indeed the best safeguard, but to paralysis of the whole country.

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it. Hegel's and Marx's great trust in the dialectial "power of negation," by virtue of which opposites do not destroy but smoothly develop into each other because contradictions promote and do not paralyze development, rests on a much older philosophical prejudice: that evil is no more than a privative modus of the good, that good can come out of evil; that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good. Such time-honored opinions have become dangerous. They are shared by many who have never heard of Hegel or Marx, for the simple reason that they inspire hope and dispel fear—a treacherous hope used to dispel legitimate fear. By this, I do not mean to equate violence with evil; I only want to stress that violence cannot be derived from its opposite, which is power, and that in order to understand it for what it is, we shall have to examine its roots and nature.

Lessons posted:
i care much more about what my peers have to say than some remote booklord.

a bunch of people you know only via lf and its spinoffs are your peers? i've been getting into that pdf tommy posted and its pretty cool so far, actually.

noavbazzer posted:
when sexchat between a bunch of drunken aesthetes makes up the majority of the drivel in this forum these days an islamic bully gang will inevitably spring up, the material conditions make it a certainty

you can join us or pay your dhimmi tax in the form of insults

thirdplace posted:

noavbazzer posted:
this hostility is poisonous!

fyi for those of us not participating in it this has been a pretty rad thread i sure enjoyed it

We are but warriors for the working-day;
Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd
With rainy marching in the painful field

How to write like Agamben


1. Take a suitably lengthy, informative, and arcane wikipedia entry - my suggestion is this on Noah's Ark.

2. Use as many of the original language reference and most arcane features in said entry to trace a genealogy of said "symbol" (remember to introduce the most esoteric or unusual by beginning with "As everyone knows")

i.e "As everyone knows Muhammad ibn al-Tabari's 915 work تاريخ الرسل والملوك suggests the donkey was the last animal on the ark, and the means by which Satan entered".

3. Make analogy between said entry and a feature of the current geo-political situation (i.e. Noah's ark as symbol of vanguard exodus), i.e.
"the donkey, as the entrance of the Satanic principle into exodus, is the prophetic sign of its fatal contamination in modernity by the biopolitical reduction of the subject to bare life."

4. Remember to make every such sign or symbol reversible: so "the donkey is at the same time the messianic sign of bare life transfigured: "And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written" (John 12:14)".

5. Add in some contemporary reference, perferably to pornography / contemporary media events / some index of the present
(ok, so the donkey conceit will now end...)

6. And loop around again

http://leniency.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-to-write-like-agamben.html