I think this is going to do it for me on reviews of Hardt & Negri’s Empire. This time up: an essay by Marxist political theorist Samir Amin, as recommended by Chabert — the link is HERE.
Amin, like the other far-left critics I’ve read, doesn’t much care for H&N’s ideas. Amin too objects to their contention that Empire is already global, discounting the nationalism behind America’s global economic and military ambitions. He refers to the imperialistic triad of the US, Europe and Japan, which together dominate the rest of the world more through the expansion of capital than through conquest of territories. I’m not clear how Amin’s view differs significantly from H&N’s in this sense of an American-centered Empire penetrating local economies throughout the world, other than a difference as to how far this penetration has already taken place.
More importantly, Amin disagrees that the Left’s agenda should and must be achieved from inside the Empire. The US, which dominates the triad, is in many ways unique historically and culturally. American workers have virtually no class awareness, Amin contends; individualistic liberalism has always permeated American culture, making it a rocky ground for leftist-communistic inclinations to take root. The long history of American democracy is undeniable and Amin contends that democracy must be part of all future progress in achieving economic equality. However, Americans are nearly apolitical, participating in state affairs only at the ballot box. Economics dominates American life, and so its government is primarily an arm of the marketplace. Americans aren’t reluctant to acknowledge their intention to protect the resource-intensive American lifestyle, securing their own economic interests at the expense of other nations and ensuring their dominance through massive military strength. By submitting to the American-dominated Empire, other nations would be acting against their own self-interests.
The idea of Multitude is central to H&N’s vision of a better future: a congeries of individual agents shooting trajectories of energy into the world. By eliminating restraints on freedom of movement, along with assuring a worldwide minimum wage, an upgraded Empire can release a vast reservoir of creative force that will lift workers’ economic status and generate an explosion of creativity in the world. Amin says that here H&N completely subscribe to the liberal ideal of the free individual as the agent of change in the world. For most of the world individuals are pretty much powerless to resist the nationalistic hegemony and intrusive power of the American empire. Amin proposes agency resides with a variety of democratic, leftist hegemonic states that aren’t modeled on America but rather are compatible with local “political cultures.”
In essence, Amin writes off America altogether. Its democracy is essentially rightist; it wants to dominate the world militarily and to hoard the lion’s share of resources. To uphold the liberal ideal of individual agency for those who stand outside the American empire is to serve as an advocate not for a global Empire that will emerge from the Multitude but for American world conquest. America isn’t the portal for the emergence of global progress of the left’s economic agenda; it is the enemy that can’t be rehabilitated but that must be actively combated. So what do you do if you happen to have the (mis)fortune of being an American living in America? Apparently you have three options: go along with the liberal status quo, pursue a radical disruptive course that will probably bring you into conflict with the authorities, or leave.
Ktismatics 
Here is the very putrescence of petty bourgeois liberal American know-nothingism. Really, what was the point of your little guided tour of Hardt and Negri and their critics – “this time up, we’re looking at Samir Amin” – what did you hope to achieve? This charade was obviously just another expression of your own ‘resource-intensive lifestyle’. It’s all just the ostentatious show-boating of your liberal openness to exotic ideas and your genial tolerance of the loopy ideas of “far-left critics” such as Amin, politely restraining your snickering just long enough to demonstrate that such openmindedness is a unique gift of the Democratic Truth-Loving American Character, which was first forged by peace-loving Puritan settlers, and is now embodied by you, ktismatics. So you give us these little summaries that amount to nothing, that are the result of a dutiful skim-reading that only serves to distort and caricature the ideas of people like Amin. But everything you talk about becomes just another excuse to giving an airing to the tiredest, most vacuous cliches of imperialist ideology such as this: “The long history of American democracy is undeniable.” Undeniable indeed: God help you if you try to deny it.
Your tone is insufferable. Samir Amin “doesn’t much care” for Empire and Multitude. Yes, because really, he’s just like you, he shares exactly the same consumer’s consciousness as you, since no other way of thinking is imaginable. He just walked into the theory shop, tried on the latest little number from H&N, gave it a twirl, but decided it just didn’t suit (perhaps because he knows, in a way that you clearly don’t, that H&N are last season’s colours anyway, consigned to the remainders section by most other theory people, making you look like a smalltown hick in comparison).
And then it all ends with this through-the-looking-glass moment, the realization that Amin is presenting you with the choice of either continuing to be what you are – an option which I suspect you know is stale and depressing – or pursuing “a radical disruptive course that will probably bring you into conflict with the authorities.” Who is this madman Amin, and where did he pick up these wild authority-disturbing ideas?
Do you read the papers? Do you know how little you have to do these days to bring yourself into conflict with “the authorities”? It can be as easy as shouting a question at a politician or writing a poem in praise of suicide-bombing. In any case, there are millions of people in your country who are in conflict with the authorities from the moment they are born, because they’re poor or have the wrong shade of skin. Conflict with the authorities – in the form of wearying encounters with petty bureaucracy, the grind of workplace discipline, or police racism – is a daily reality for millions of people.
And by the way ktismatics, even Hardt and Negri are trying to give the impression that their ideas would lead to some level of confrontation with authorities, even if it is so watered-down as to remain evidently imperceptible to people like you. (Didn’t you know that Negri spent years in exile and in prison for his political activities? Everyone on the planet knows that – that’s why these books have a certain cachet of edginess and subversion. That Negri co-wrote Empire while in prison is one of its selling points. You didn’t know that? What’s wrong with you?)
Well anyway let me set you straight on one thing ktismatics. Samir Amin is absolutely, definitively NOT counselling that Americans of your ilk should leave their country. Au contraire. For the sake of the rest of the world, stay exactly where you are! The world has had enough of the wide-eyed adventures of people like you in the outside world, and the evidence of what happens when you go “shooting trajectories of energy into the world” can currently be seen in cities like Falluja and Baghdad.
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“Here is the very putrescence of petty bourgeois liberal American know-nothingism. Really, what was the point of your little guided tour of Hardt and Negri and their critics – “this time up, we’re looking at Samir Amin” – what did you hope to achieve?”
I hoped to achieve some sort of informative conversation with people who regard H&N and similar positions as indistinguishable from American neoliberal boosterism. I undertook this series of posts because of you, Kenoma, and your critique of k-punk’s recent post. You’ll recall that on Parody Center I expressed interest that you or someone who shared your opinion would write a critique outlining why they thought H&N, k-punk etc. were shilling for America. I did a comment there looking at a few points where you substantively critiqued k-punk’s piece, but your response was that you’d already moved on from k-punk — I presume you feel the same way about H&N, who are yesternday’s news. Traxus was gracious enough to point me toward several on-line reviews of H&N, and Chabert highlighted a couple more. So I put up short summaries of some of these criticisms of H&N. If anybody reading along at home wants to discuss these points they’re invited to participate in online discussion. I’d rather you had written the posts, since I expect your own thought is more aligned with H&N’s critics than with H&N, and that you probably think more about politics than I do generally speaking. So I settled for second best.
At this point I understand better the contention that H&N are presenting a repackaged neoliberalism, and generally I agree. Are H&N like the Borg — resistance is futile, so sign your minds over to Empire? Are they shills for the American dream? Are they serious, offering something substantive beyond the neoliberal repackaging? Do any of these questions matter, inasmuch as they’re starting from the wrong premises and shouldn’t be bothered with? I suppose that’s where I am now.
“But everything you talk about becomes just another excuse to giving an airing to the tiredest, most vacuous cliches of imperialist ideology such as this: “The long history of American democracy is undeniable.” Undeniable indeed: God help you if you try to deny it.”
I quote from Amin’s essay: The ill-considered praise that they make of American “democracy” strongly contrasts with the writings of analysts critical of North American society, rejected up front because their “anti-Americanism” disqualifies them (in the eyes of whom? the American establishment?). I will cite here only Anatol Lieven’s America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2004) whose conclusions largely coincide with mine despite our different ideological and scientific starting points. Lieven links the American democratic tradition (the reality of which no one would contest) to the obscurantist origins of the country (which is perpetuated and reproduced by successive waves of immigrants). My interpretation of Amin’s position is that America’s democratic tradition exists, despite the irony quotes he puts around the word, but that it’s inherently conservative and offers no sort of model for the non-American left to emulate, let alone to accede to in in the form of Empire. Would you say that’s a brief yet accurate summary of at least part of what Amin says? Isn’t that what I said in the rest of the passage about American democracy that you quoted? Do you agree with Amin in this regard? That sort of thing.
“Samir Amin “doesn’t much care” for Empire and Multitude.”
You’re right: I should have said that Amin really hates Multitude. Here’s the last sentence of the essay: The renaissance of a left worthy of the name, capable of inspiring and implementing progress for the benefit of the people, requires a radical rupture with discourses of this type. I was more interested in summarizing some of the reasons why he holds this opinion.
“Who is this madman Amin, and where did he pick up these wild authority-disturbing ideas?”
I’m summarizing from Amin’s essay “The American Ideology”, where he talks about the limited options available to the left in engaging an American economic and political system which he says will not hesitate to resort to violence if threatened: All radical American activists know this only too well; the only options open to them are to sell out, or one day be killed. I’d say he picked up these ideas from observing the American scene and drawing conclusions, and he must have thought it worthwhile to write it down. You’re right: I added the bit about radical American activists leaving the country. That was maybe too optimistic, proposing that radicals might be able to advance their cause more successfully outside of the hostile American political climate.
In sum, then, I’d say that you object to the way my summary of Amin’s position may have trivialized or homogenized it, and that you object even more to my tone, from which you’ve deduced that I am an ignorant shill for the ignorant — and dangerous — American way of life. Is that a fair assessment?
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that’s the right calm and reasonable tone to undertake with these radical marxists, clysmatics. it is only in this way that we may hope to enligten and ultimately pacify them. i have spent many hours trying to reason them like that. it didn’t work. but i will keep trying. there must be a way out of the materialist mud.
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the real reason I’m interested in America is for the sake of culture, science, for coca cola, Psychological advance in the world, moovies, technologies, medicine, and for American humour and law.(even though Dutch law is better ;) ).
I read about knitting, engines, puzzles, solar backpacks, survival guides for children, howto’s.
American research, policies in education (much problems are universal after all).
And I like californian wine and American icecream.
My father is probably shaking his head (he’s French) but he likes it too if I give him some.
I would like to export the Dutch (European) system of midwives and neonatal care and good working conditions for all and basic social security.
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haven’t been ignoring this; will comment more substantially later on. for the moment though, i think kenoma/chabert are being a lot less patient and more insulting than i like to be, but i understand the frustration. ktismatics, i think your postings and comments would be helped if you tried to make a positive argument, rather than just ‘rephrasing.’ maybe you feel like you don’t completely understand what’s being said. i don’t know. but you come off as though you are trying to explain something regardless, and clearly the resultant tone rankles. it’s hard to tell if anything is getting through to you sometimes, if you’re really reading carefully, or what you’re trying to do or say with this series of posts, and i think you are confusing everyone. if you are just trying to be ‘neutral’ you aren’t reading or explaining yourself carefully enough. after going over these critiques of h&n, what do you actually think? can we get some comparisons maybe? some outside views? we can read (and half of us have read) the articles on our own.
kenoma/chabert, i think you should call off the assault. don’t think it will get anywhere in this case. if you’re really frustrated, i’m sorry i led you here. thought i was going to be able to comment more.
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“you come off as though you are trying to explain something regardless, and clearly the resultant tone rankles. it’s hard to tell if anything is getting through to you sometimes, if you’re really reading carefully, or what you’re trying to do or say with this series of posts, and i think you are confusing everyone.”
I once said here that I write posts for an imaginary audience that’s a lot like me, which in this case is someone who doesn’t think often about political matters, who’s had enough with the alleged left on the mainstream American political spectrum, who’s trying to explore some options, who’s not yet prepared to opine strongly. I’ve heard from a couple people who’ve been reading these posts, one a regular and the other a newcomer, who have found these links and posts helpful. They’ve read some H&N and are left-leaning but say they feel reluctant to comment for fear of exposing their ignorance. I feel their pain, as the saying goes. I’d say that the people who do know more about H&N than I and who have commented here seem more inclined to chastise and to denigrate than to contribute anything substantive. You say you can’t tell whether anything is getting through to me; I’ve had the same experience reading some of the responses to my own remarks and clarifications. If you feel embarrassed for having pointed your readers to an amateur’s musings, I’ll state for the record that it’s not your fault they’ve been disappointed by their visits here. After the first post I was going to suggest that you write one on the subject, but given your absence from the discussion here I figured you were too busy. Still, I’d be very interested if you did post. You’ve expressed some enthusiasm for the Multitude, which isn’t getting a lot of positive press either in these essays or in the comments here. Maybe you could take that topic on.
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understood, ktis — maybe will post on this later.
“If you feel embarrassed for having pointed your readers to an amateur’s musings, I’ll state for the record that it’s not your fault they’ve been disappointed by their visits here.”
i said that, to them, because it didn’t seem like they were getting much out of this, aside from love of flame. maybe i should apologize to you for bringing them here if there are people you want to talk to who feel intimidated. you can always ask people to leave if there are conversations you’d rather be having you know, this IS your blog.
that said, i do think you’d be helped by paying closer attention to the content of their critiques.
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i mean why are we, and these people you’re reading, getting so testy? are we just crazy and stupid? if that’s the case, why bother with us?
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That’s okay Traxus, I have learned a few things from everyone who has participated.
“i do think you’d be helped by paying closer attention to the content of their critiques.”
I presume you’re referring to the published critiques rather than the comments. While my posts may not demonstrate it adequately, I assure you that I am paying attention. Obviously these experts have covered more ground than I’ve put in my brief synopses. I don’t think I’ve misconstrued what they have to say; rather, I’ve limited my attention to those features of each article that I would like to have discussed at more length. Sadly, the discussions haven’t really gone in that direction.
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There is a lot of unnecessary testiness that gets conflated with righteous indignation and ideological zeal. It’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about, partly in reference to your most recent post.
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“I would like to export the Dutch (European) system of midwives and neonatal care and good working conditions for all and basic social security.”
Me too, Odile. I’d also like to see America do a better job of land management and alternative energy use like Holland does. The Netherlands is I believe the second most populous nation on earth (first is Bangladesh), but you’d never know it by traveling around. Open fields surround the densely populated cities, with many people using public transportation and riding bicycles. Midwifery is making headway here against the American status quo of hospitalization. I’d like to be able to get some of that salty licorice from Holland.
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I don’t know about the rest of you who have been contributing to this scintillating discussion but I’m learning a lot about stuff that I have had very little exposure to. Ktismatics explorations are just about at a level where I can get a gist of an idea, tho to be frank much of the ensuing discussion floats right over my head!
I too can now see the liberal corruption that has snuck in with H&N. I can see to a lot of value in an individualised response that iteratively causes change. Globalisation is a one way street right now but will that change? Look at the collapse of the trade talks between the EU and Africa.
The question is also change towards what? The rhetoric of libertarianism, the power of democracy, the sanctity of human rights on the one hand with the juridical-rights component perhaps drawing us towards equality as an explorable and worthwhile concept?
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“Do you know how little you have to do these days to bring yourself into conflict with “the authorities”? It can be as easy as shouting a question at a politician or writing a poem in praise of suicide-bombing.”
I’m so glad the world has so obviously IMPROVED, at least in the case of shit poems, probably often written by Mrs. Kenoma.
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the realization that Amin is presenting you with the choice of either continuing to be what you are – an option which I suspect you know is stale and depressing –
Has to BE Arpege KLEIN. Knows everything MOLLY KLEIN knows, adds a little ‘innit’ here, a little ‘knob-end’ there. ‘Insufferable tone’ Clysmatics has–well, you’re ALL charm. and RYAN VU is just wonderful in his new role as appeaser, having made the world safe from Hitler, since earlier ordinary Germans wouldn’t until this brave Childie showed off Klein-bottle-muscle.
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‘that’s the right calm and reasonable tone to undertake with these radical marxists, clysmatics’
No, that isn’t, you ridiculous fool!
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“you can always ask people to leave if there are conversations you’d rather be having you know, this IS your blog.”
Scout’s honor. The Klein-Vu Boy Scout.
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“you can always ask people to leave if there are conversations you’d rather be having you know, this IS your blog.
that said, i do think you’d be helped by paying closer attention to the content of their critiques.”
Jesus God, the WISDOM this Boy Scout has managed, so balanced and pure, over a mere 3 days of having saved the fucking world from a couple of FREAKS. You fucking asshole.
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And Childie, do not expect me to worry about a ‘Boycott’, as Kenoma requested. You are the one who is going to pay the price for your insufferable stupidity and provincial Detroit-grown crap. This is NOT, even if Clysmatics agrees with you and asks me to leave–which only proves Kenoma right about how you can’t say ANYTHING except that she is only concerned with her immediate ass on the blogs, the HORROR of revealing your real name and MOLLY KLEIN’s so you can’t hide behind your friggin’ masks anymore–only proves the neoliberal ‘good American’ which you, Childie-traxus, are representing as you ‘fight for the right.’ Yes, I am sidelining this argument, because you are trying to use it to consolidate what you think is your power, you little prick. I don’t give a fuck if Clysmatics deletes me, refuses me, if Dejan then does the same because of his new appeasements being added this morning. You have achieved nothing but proving that you are deceitful little fuck, and I intend to do whatever is necessary to prevail. You locked us out of your blog, so expect me to follow you and derail other threads or open your fuckin’ ass blog up again, you evil snake.
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Traxus, I don’t understand why my allegedly intemperate tone should be the issue here at all. ktismatics is quite happy to continue to consort with the kind of people who publish the personal details of other bloggers and spew vile racist and misogynistic abuse as a matter of course, so I can assume he can take what I have to say, which is extremely mild by comparison.
ktismatics, Your shtick is wide-eyed, disarming innocence, with all these naive questions – “Are H&N like the Borg?” – and this fake deference to my supposed expertise in the writings of Hardt and Negri etc.(In fact, you probably know more about Hardt and Negri than I do, since I haven’t read them in about 4 years). All to give the impression that what I’m saying is so obscure and unheard-of that I must be an adept in some ‘far-left’ esoterica you imagine exists somewhere on the fringes. This naivete is a stock tactic of those who sell imperialism; your hick innocence isn’t very far from Bush’s in this respect. Why you carry around these ideas about innocent puritan settlers, why you are confused about the reasons your government went to war on Iraq, is really of no interest to me. I just wanted to point out that this naivete, whether it is feigned or real, is just as much a cause of the wars and imperialist policies as is rabid neo-con aggression. It is also deeply disingenuous: you have clearly elected yourself to speak as the innocent average American citizen, befuddled by all these attacks on the American way of life; but there are millions upon millions of people in the US who know exactly why the war was fought and who know that the myths you peddle about America being founded on high ideals of brotherly love are lies.
And by the way, when I asked ‘who is this man Amin?’, I was being ironic. I know very well who Amin is, and that Hardt and Negri are pygmies next to him. It wouldn’t have taken you much effort to find out either.
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Dad Jonquille is right, you are increasingly disappointing me with your soft bottom shenanigans. I like a top dad, in charge of his composure, not that Christian guilt trip, throwing pearls before swine, catering to the lowest common denominator in what can only be described as sub-human garbage cultural product. I am boycotting comments until you tell the Klein-Vu couple what you REALLY think of their perverse marriage. And Childie Vu-lva, if you think you look tough with that moralising & patronising posture, let me assure you, you don’t; you just look like the latest Asian accessory on Molly’s clit!
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‘Traxus, I don’t understand why my allegedly intemperate tone should be the issue here at all.’
Perfect! And quite right, let the baby learn the hard way what kind of person you are, you know, the ‘altermondialist who one should join despite the fact of its not being complimentary.’ Well, Childie DID join you, and he won’t mind the rough dyke edges you offer; at least you won’t point out his inferiority complex.
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“your hick innocence isn’t very far from Bush’s in this respect.’
You’ll be disappeared in no time, kenoma, not necessarily from Clysmatics’s blog, but hopefully from all visibility.
Dejan, you’ll notice that Childie appealed both to Kenoma AND ARPEGE KLEIN. That is ALREADY not allowed. That’s why I think Kenoma is just an Arpege computer.
‘Hick innocence’ indeed. May you rot in hell, kenoma! If you’re not ARPEGE KLEIN, you are no different, and your writing style is exactly the same.
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“sub-human garbage cultural product.”
LOL! Far worse than Clysmatics’s ‘hick innocence’, which, from what I can tell, he hasn’t at all anyway. He’s just a HUMAN BEING, not cheap CULTURAL PRODUCT like the Klein-Vu Couple and their Cyborg triplet, Mrs. Kenoma, whom I’m increasingly realizing has to be an Arpege computer.
Dejan, the Blog Buzz HAS to have an ‘At Home with the Klein-Vu Family’ if you don’t put it as a separate post. This marriage is by far the most MOMENTOUS thing in recent Hedda-Louella developments.. It’s like the first time Frank Sinatra fucked Ava Gardner, only worse…Be sure to do some cartoon Xmas trees and Menorahs for the holiday season. And be SURE not to forget to include not only HAPPY KWANZA, but isn’t there a Muslim holiday that tries to destroy Xmas too?
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“Traxus, I don’t understand why my allegedly intemperate tone should be the issue here at all. ktismatics is quite happy to continue to consort with the kind of people who publish the personal details of other bloggers and spew vile racist and misogynistic abuse as a matter of course, so I can assume he can take what I have to say, which is extremely mild by comparison.”
yeah, good point, kenoma. but i think this is the only adequate justification, not ktismatic’s attempts to work through these texts that we all have some interest in. not saying The Internet needs to ‘all get along’ but abuse is a different thing altogether from thorough critique, and publishing private information/issuing threats is a different thing altogether from that. on the critique level you try and try and then give up if nothing comes of it. the abuse is contagious.
ktismatics, i hope you understand that the divisions and team-forming you see going on here are entirely a result of dejan/jonquille’s persistent stalking and abuse. these are the kinds of relations that they create, their real ‘art.’ if it continues i just won’t comment here anymore. but this is how it works, make no mistake.
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“the divisions and team-forming you see going on here are entirely a result of dejan/jonquille’s persistent stalking and abuse.”
‘ideological’ flare-ups are par for the course in conversations about tendentious subjects, you just learn to deal with it after a while and not get your feelings hurt. but this creeptastic fanaticism JUST KEEPS GOING AND GOING AND DOES NOT STOP.
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Holy cow, I go off to the grocery store and look what happens! Well, a lot of this has nothing to do with me, and a lot that does have to do with me seems not worth responding to, so here goes:
“I can see to a lot of value in an individualised response that iteratively causes change.”
The Multitude idea is consistent with the immanent “schizzes and flows” in Deleuze & Guattari. I too find this approach promising, but the society either blocks or ignores the trajectories that don’t fit in. I think this is the case even at the individual level, where things like values and cost-benefit analyses and advertising affect the way people respond to one another’s projects. Politically too this is the case: certain political positions are almost assured not to receive an audience because they’re too far out of the mainstream. That I think is part of Amin’s point about American democracy: it’s so conservative that even the left in the US is everybody else’s right. India I suspect covers a broader political spectrum so it’s possible that a far-left coalition might actually form at the grass-roots level. Would you say that’s the case Sam?
“Are H&N like the Borg?”
No, I wondered if the Empire is like the Borg.
“this fake deference to my supposed expertise in the writings of Hardt and Negri etc.”
It wasn’t fake, but maybe it was unjustified.
“This naivete is a stock tactic of those who sell imperialism”
To whom am I selling it? Surely not to you. My vast readership? Let me check… according to my Sitemeter blog stats I’ve had 200 page views so far today, which is very high for ktismatics. This marks the 4th day in a row of 200+ page views, and I hadn’t had any days that high for a month before that. Comments and controversy sell papers, even if the discussion isn’t particularly enlightening.
“when I asked ‘who is this man Amin?’, I was being ironic. I know very well who Amin is”
I understood your irony. Did you appreciate the irony in the fact that two of the instances of my cliche-ridden naivete-in-irony-quotes came directly from Amin’s essays?
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“a result of dejan/jonquille’s persistent stalking and abuse.”
Even if can be construed as ‘abuse’, it has nothing to do with stalking, you vulgar bitch. You’re the stalker, because I CERTAINLY did not want to have to meet with you TWICE. Rotten to the core you are.
Still trying to keep the Barbarian Mao-Tse Tung Youth Guards going, I see (American Boy Scout style, of course.)
Now we see how below-the-belt an alienated Asian-American will go.
25.
‘ideological’ flare-ups are par for the course in conversations about tendentious subjects, you just learn to deal with it after a while and not get your feelings hurt. but this creeptastic fanaticism JUST KEEPS GOING AND GOING AND DOES NOT STOP.
Dejan, this is what I told you he thought he could pull off: Determining the terms of discussion and debate. He deserves absolutely no rights and privileges if he cannot keep his composure at someone else’s blog, which he is using as his Punicle’s Stage since he can’t take the heat at home. Not to mention that the gal(s) is about to having him a la Cannibalisme for dinner.
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“the divisions and team-forming you see going on here”
Whereas, Marxists don’t think divisions and team-forming are at all necessary ever–they are always ONLY interested in a sweet unity of understood Masochism, emasculation as achieved by Childie Klein-Vu, and anti-Nietzscheanism so that such as Rosa Fucking Luxembourg can run the clubs! WITHOUT ORCHIDS!
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ktismatics is quite happy to continue to consort with the kind of people who publish the personal details of
you total wimp, it was on your blog that molly started publishing our private letters in defense from my ‘terrible abuse’ (as if her allegations of racism, antifeminism and homophobia, as well as her constant vicious attacks on k punk and jodi dean, MY FRIENDS that is, aren’t abuse, and as if she is not the very incarnation of the word ”abuse”), she has no respect for my privacy or my feelings and i’m obliged to have respect for her holy cunt. do you realize to what extent you have no spine, you boring little tart.
and as if you didn’t scavenge on the parody and the flame wars, enjoying them to the bottomless pit of your bitch bottom. it’s just a bunch of stupid lies.
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“the divisions and team-forming you see going on here are entirely a result of dejan/jonquille’s persistent stalking and abuse.”
I think that divisions and team-forming affected the comments on these H&N posts before the shit-slinging even started. It carries over from other places, with presumptions of guilt by association and subsequent ridicule of offhand remarks stoking the fire, turning intelligent and informed discussants into hostile and defensive combatants, ascribing intentions that often just aren’t there but which then create bad feelings where goodwill had previously ruled the day. I’ve seen it before, and I’ve seen it here. It’s like trying to drive through a rainstorm when your wipers aren’t working — a lot of concentration is required to ignore the distractions and keep your eye on the road.
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And dejan, I dug up all the rest of Molly’s emails, which include much criticism of CR, and piss-pitiful laments about Amie (remember her) and also about Matt and Jodi. So they keep giving us trouble, I’ll publish them at CPC. Their cheap ‘moral high ground’ in which Childie, asshole of the Eastern World, is most expert, has no effect whatever on me. Amazing how much guilt-giving is involved with the hard Marxists. Leninino’s blog is the best example of a hoard of people all united by common individual failure and hatred.
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ktismatics, i hope you understand that the divisions and team-forming
yes Klein-Vu, there are DEEP divisons between teams. And coming from me, who once juggled all yer teams with the ease of a gracious dolphin, this should telegraph seriousness to you – the Parody Center and the evil Chabert-American Stranger conspiracy are AT WAR.
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“- the Parody Center and the evil Chabert-American Stranger conspiracy are AT WAR.”
Quite so, Dejan. But the question is: Was it a strategy on Childie Klein-Vu’s part to pretend that there was ‘no need for war’, or was he just too piss-scared of it to imagine that we’d let him posture in this idiotic peacemaker configuration.
Childie Klein-Vu sings the old Coca-Cola song: “I’d like to teach the world to SING, in Purr-fect Har-mo-nee…I’d like to give the world a Coke…and keep it com-pa-neee…Coca-Cola is….Coca-Cola is….
And dejan, remember at the onset of this when the Kenoma-whore said she didn’t think ‘a flame war’ was ‘advisable’. They are all so pitiable at their consistent insistence that sitting on their asses will teach anything about warfare (which presumable socialist revolutions are required to use, and always did. Actually, since Socialism was successful only in Western Europe, it surely is that those White Yerupeens were using the low-class Russians as Labour for the Capitalistic Profit of Socialist Product.
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I think that divisions and team-forming affected the comments on these H&N posts before the shit-slinging even started.
Exactly, the Marxist dawgs came in barking at you dad, insulting my utterly decent and friendly SUPERMAN of a dad, on account of the same old tired Marxist shit about the Purity of their humanist views (which let me tell you something Traxus only supports because of his Eastern Taoism that is to say naivette; he doesn’t even KNOW what these types of Commies are like!) The Marxist dawgs are barking at EVERYBODY in fact who doesn’t accept the secret code to the Qlipoth Toilets. If you disagree, you’re dead. These are Moozlim fundamentalist terrorists in Materialist drag.
Jonquille I don’t want to do the letters now, I already showed Molly that she didn’t scare me and that I can answer to her extremism by extremism. Otherwise I find such methods profoundly Stalinist and if she wasn;t the garbage that she is never would even consider them. In addition, she’s so boring that even that publication won’t make any difference; who wants to read about a small-minded Jewish musical anyway!
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“he doesn’t even KNOW what these types of Commies are like”
Indeed Childie Klein-Vu does not, but he certainly DOES need to find out. At this point, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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certain political positions are almost assured not to receive an audience because they’re too far out of the mainstream
That’s all too true but then the essence of freedom is that one is not but voluntarily tied to being part of the popularly correct. The difference is that everyone cooperates on ‘getting the job done’ but simultaneously might hold any of a wide variety of personal and political views. It is partly a fear of this X factor that is fueling the new anti terrorist McCarthyism.
It was always true that in a ‘good neighborhood’ a significant amount of effort goes into maintenance and neatness (e.g. the lawns would be weeded and regularly mowed) and this is a common denominator, but within the population that is cooperatively living out the American Dream, there is a lot of resistance to doing anything that is not contributory or positive in some sense. It is the point at which the ability of advertisement fails that holds the most promise for change.
The blogosphere will help too unless it too gets subverted – and there’s a lot of planning going into how that can be made to happen!
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“one is not but voluntarily tied to being part of the popularly correct.”
I agree, but when the popularly correct hold all the cards it can be difficult to get any sort of variance into public view where it might exert countervailing force. People end up making spectacles of themselves just to get noticed, or else retreat into gloomy pessimism, or as Amin observes, they sell out or get themselves killed. This is the difficulty of working on individual change — if you get too far off the track you’re in danger of getting stuck or lost, and nobody will come to look for you.
Most of us are involuntarily tied to certain things, like adhering to laws that may be arbitrary, finding acceptable ways of making a living even if the work itself is meaningless or perhaps even counterproductive, paying taxes to a government that is pursuing an illegal and corrupt occupation of a foreign country…
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Kt, I’m glad your series on Empire is coming to an end. Reading all the horrible comments is proof that the Multitude will by necessity rid itself of the shackles of sectarian leftist back-stabbing and posturing as it rises from the potential of worker subjectivity. Just as the vanguardist ideal was tacked on *last*, so to it will be tacked of *first*, like a tick-bird tacking a tick of a sleeping buffalo.
There is nothing for you to lose but the chains that bind you to these parasitic ego-fascists as you end the Empire topic. BRAVO! The masquerade that has followed you down every side street has obsfucated meaningfull discussion of H&N’s thesis maybe, but has only proved a broader point imo.
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sorry, by ‘divisions and team-forming’ i meant ‘battalions and family units.’ you asked to engage with ‘marxists.’ if you are not yourself a marxist that is already a ‘team.’ but it’s not yet ‘war,’ which this is.
again, distinctions and judgments of scale need to be made.
“it was on your blog that molly started publishing our private letters in defense from my ‘terrible abuse’ (as if her allegations of racism, antifeminism and homophobia, as well as her constant vicious attacks on k punk and jodi dean, MY FRIENDS that is, aren’t abuse, and as if she is not the very incarnation of the word ”abuse”)”
yes, and i’m sorry i let that happen the last time. it’s deleted now, though i know that doesn’t really matter as your dad republished it. it’s hard not to want those out in the open though when you keep lying about your personal agency. all these ‘attacks’ either happened on her blog, or on yours when you asked her to go there, and got mean because you kept pushing the same points over and over when it was clear she did not agree. not everyone has an unlimited supply of patience. and of course, you started going there BECAUSE she is mean. and, she has never been the one following you around, you could and can end this anytime you want. she doesn’t have that luxury, thanks to YOU.
anyway, good luck fixing those wipers, ktismatics.
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“Kt, I’m glad your series on Empire is coming to an end.”
I am too I suppose, though I agree that mostly what was there to be learned materialized unbidden in the “metasphere.” Kenoma is right about me in a sense: I’m far more irascible in person than I usually am on the blogs.
“anyway, good luck fixing those wipers, ktismatics.”
The rain does seem to be slowing down now…
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and of course, you started going there BECAUSE she is mean.
yes but it wasn’t personal – it was a PARODY you dork! Then she turned it personal.
Started calling me on my ”hypocrisy” because I don’t idealize her idiotic Communism and because I told her she is misrepresenting the Serbian case in order to protect inane British Leninism. Started showing her vulgar materialism down my throat. And you idiot don’t you see this is the kind of a person who can publicly call K-punk on his admission of sexual abuse, for which he probably needed to collect enormous guts, as any abuse victim knows so well, and then degrade him from a position of Puritan superiority and her completely insane declarations of health and vitalism (”I am a happily married woman” and ”I am healthy in the head unlike these sick wimps”). I am shocked and in awe that you don’t put this under scrutiny, even if for parodic purposes only, instead of delving into that tired Spectacle Society tirade which she stretched beyond belief despite it being quite trivial and uninteresting, because Baurdrillard and Zizek both already wrote about it. I read her overlong diatribes, she only repeats ONE FUCKING thought. The only substance she has is her rhetoric; but then she doesn’t even practise that consequentially, and is so narcissistic that she can’t play the game to the end, so now she’s accusing me of ”stalking” her. Like, ‘”Dejan you’re stalking me, I am completely innocent of stalking” You also had the opportunity yesterday to witness that she brushed off my completely honest attempt at reconciliation, because of course she WANTS all this. She lives for this, in fact. That’s all the evil snake has, her viper tongue.
she doesn’t have that luxury, thanks to YOU.
oh poor little oppressed AMERICAN COWGIRL IN PARIS! I’m weeping for her.
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India is another sort of a melting pot. We still have real communist parties and they do win some elections in a couple of states. There is also a militant wing that was once a part of the main body but has now been disowned.
But, with the death of soviet style communism, the oomph seems to have disappeared. The communist parties are right now allied with the ex-socialist Congress (the party of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and soon indira’s grandson should take the reins) which has shed its socialist roots and is swinging economically right, but then politics always makes for strange bedfellows.
we see globalisation from the receiving end and whatever else be the agenda, today’s MNCs are expert at subverting developing nations to get what they want. In India, the media, the airlines, insurance, and retail are all being ‘liberalised’ (deregulated and opened to MNC stakeholders). Consumerism is on the rise as is the power of advertising. It will be interesting to see if any effective resistance develops but right now it looks like it will be a clean sweep and one more large developing economy will get to go the American Way.
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ecause you kept pushing the same points over and over when it was clear she did not agree. not everyone has an unlimited supply of patience
this would be valid in any OTHER case, except HERS. I think she has to be taught to learn the value and power of WORDS, that you just can’t go around getting away with everything you vomit out of your big vulgar mouth. especially not when she’s dealing with MY country, and by extension, MY life. this arrogant livestock thinks she can just say anything, and stronger, that that’s BRAVE and RADICAL. this kind of a mouth is only good for cocksucking, even as it may appear that it reflects ”female intelligence”.
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and this is exactly what she’s doing all the time – sucking my cock through all this political pornography, as the academics masturbate; I think it’s quite brilliant, and I am worthy of Dusan Makavejev, my country’s celebrated parodist (of Communism and Capitalism alike)!
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“she doesn’t have that luxury, thanks to YOU”
Stop trying to reason with the evil Ryan Vu, Dejan. he’s with them 100% now, and is to dull to want otherwise. And do leave the emails up, RYAN VU wasn’t sly enough this time to get his beloved mistress’s admission, by her actions of publishing private correspondence, that she does what she accuses everybody else of. And I don’t find your terming ‘Stalinism’ of emails you yourself asked me about just last night. I am going to paste them when I get ready, or you can learn to quit asking me things you arbitrarily and whimsically change your mind about. I want it out in the open about all the ways she tries to get intimate with people and then turns on them–all of them. By the way, she lived in London before Paris, that’s where she found the ‘blissful marriage’, so she definitely is Kenoma, knows how to give it a British twist, and leave at least a few details of her usual style out–but for such a new blog she seems to know all the history of everything.
I mean, just who the FUCK did you think Zbigniew Tolstoy was? That was missus, but she just made a fake blog, without it having a site. That’s why the statistics about blogs created every minute are so huge, people make up these blogs which are just for comments to look more important.
I don’t have confidence in you to last against these armies of SHIT. The very idea that you thought you should still try to appease MOLLY KLEIN so recently proves that you will not be able to survive this evil Asian turd, but I can’t watch your back every few minutes. RYAN VU is bad news, and every time he writes he is more disgusting. Just the thought of him is enough to make me vomit. And you can’t even realize that, in virtual terms, you should not be discussing things with him. You should be trying to virtually kill him. He is that ugly a person.
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“You also had the opportunity yesterday to witness that she brushed off my completely honest attempt at reconciliation, because of course she WANTS all this.”
I still can’t buy this. Three days ago is way too deep into all this shit for you to be so stupid as to think reconciliation was possible. You are just dependent on her female meanness, RYAN VU loves it because he is himself a cold-blooded female, and your talk about how Lacanian therapy helps against ‘needing support’ is thus disproved by this case. I even go out a few hours, and you say MOLLY KLEIN is sucking your cock and has a mouth only for sucking cock. That’s the falseness of your idealized virtual relationships comes in: Cocksucking is PHYSICAL, and is not done on the internet, and MOLLY KLEIN would be the most disgraceful cocksucker in the world. So I come back to find you sucking Ryan Vu’s cock, and you haven’t written a fucking thing at CPC. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself.
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“yes, and i’m sorry i let that happen the last time. it’s deleted now, though i know that doesn’t really matter as your dad republished it.”
And I copied the rest of this proof of MOLLY KLEIN publishing the emails on your blog, to cover my little piss-pitiful friend who went off and got scared of MISS MOLLY again. You really shouldn’t have put this here, if you wanted to save
Arpege’s ass, because now that I’ve copied her comment, she has no case. Dejan has proved himself an idiot in his love of ARPEGE KLEIN’s meanness, you are right about that, RYAN VU, but you, too, are attracted to her meanness, which gives you comfort and security against the world of men, within which you cannot function.
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“Here is the very putrescence of petty bourgeois liberal American know-nothingism.”
That was pretty good though, I have to admit.
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That was pretty good though, I have to admit.
Well, maybe, but that and the ‘hick innocence’ are pure Arpege. There are way too many indicators by now that we are dealing with the same person, and that this was Arpege’s latest strategy. anyway, Dejan saying he proved he wasn’t scared by her is irresponsible, because he has since proved he IS. So is Ryan Vu. I’m not, because I’ve got tons of old emails saved about the Valium.
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Three days ago is way too deep into all this shit for you to be so stupid as to think reconciliation was possible.
Hedda we are going to have to talk about your constant thwarting of smooth cooperation at the Parody Center, although on the other hand I appreciate it that you are willing to critisize your business partner because it shows the world that we are not an undemocratic enterprise like the Molly Klein Enterpresises, Inc. I did not really THINK anything when I sent her the reconciliatory letter, but apparently from the fact that she decided to abuse it it’s quite obvious that her vengefulness is infinite and that she would never forgive anyone – so this is supreme evidence of her meanness.
“Here is the very putrescence of petty bourgeois liberal American know-nothingism.”
Yeah right as opposed to Communist American Pollyanna all-knowingness. What a bunch of total creeps, they really should be arrested.
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Here are the comments deleted without asking me, and quite Stalinistically from Dejan’s blog. One learns in the world of the blogger-identified to cover oneself legally at all times:
126. jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 11, 2007 at 1:37 am
You truly are unbelievably pansey. I just copied and pasted RYAN VU’s comment at Clysmatics admitting his blog had allowed MOLLY KLEIN to post your private correspondence. If you think she would try defamation suits against you, you are just pitiful. I have tons of correspondence from her about the Valium as well as all the American bloggers. If she wants to post private correspondence from you, why should you worry that she’d pull out a suit. After all, she freely sent all that personal information. That is not the same as lustmolch threatening Scott’s and Jodi’s families, which MOLLY KLEIN defended in the name of ‘his mental illness’ all over the place.
Are you having a fucking nervous breakdown or something? Arpege KLEIN just scares you. Anyway, I’ve got your stupid ass covered, and I wrote Jodi about this. I am not going to fool with your silly girlish fear of RYAN VU and MOLLY KLEIN. Besides, if they keep pulling things, their phone numbers have not yet been published, and I WILL DO SO the minute they try to do anything, even though I hardly consider you much more excuse for a man that RYAN VU.
127. jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 11, 2007 at 3:34 am
All right, I think I really will leave it at this. You’re quite as much a hysteric as MOLLY KLEIN and quite as much of a woman as RYAN VU. You disgust me for going back and writing at his blog. And you might as well get it straight: “I just don’t”, you said about how you don’t see the difference in online and offline relationships. As if I couldn’t even argue with you, you in your endless top/bottom talk, with fantasies of dads and mums everywhere. I recall you even said you thought of me and you as ‘married’, and that is where the danger signal was. I have sex with men who are like me, not sissies like you and RYAN VU. So you might as well get any fantasies about me out of your head now. I don’t intend to meet you and probably no other bloggers, as I have found from meeting Roger and RYAN VU that it is not worth it–except to write about them: I wrote about Roger in the first new chapter, and now I’ll write about Ryan, since by now he’s become a fiction, which I hadn’t thought he was. That doesn’t mean I don’t find you more admirable than I do them in spite of your absurd behaviour today. But you’re much more unstable than I thought, and you do depend on the online community far more than I do. You’re extremely manipulative and that’s a real bore. So you can do what you want with the Parody Oscars, trying to work with you has gotten in the way of my own writing anyway. You’ve fucked around with me about the emails, the REAL SHIT about writing Jodi in panic about MOLLY KLEIN, it fucking is sickening. Again, I don’t find you a piece of dogshit the way I find MOLLY KLEIN and RYAN VU, but you still do their bidding. In short, Dejan, you’re a coward like they are..
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Here are the comments deleted without asking me, and quite Stalinistically from Dejan’s blog.
Yes and all others will be deleted containing your narcissistic essays that bite your own partner’s ass; if you don’t want to work at the Parody Center, don’t – nobody’s ever forced you – work on your own writing. I am not addicted to any online community, and the mom/dad/top/bottom thing is a metametameta joke about the fact that all these academicians only really need a big hard cock.
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How dare you delete those comments, you fuck–and write me emails that ‘we are a team’? Go do it by yourself. This tenders my resignation, you can act like the girl in Hairspray with somebody else.
It’s okay by now that Ryan won this battle in only one sense–the most mediocre, which is to say, blogger-identity. Most of this talk is not about real politics, and socialism vs. capitalism, but blogger to blogger. I thought Ryan understood this, but he did not, and with a vengeance asserted his identity as a blogger–most would not even know he majors in Romantic English Poetry–Keats, Shelley–as he never talks about it. I probably only met him in person (after meeting Roger only to find another blogger-identified person) because he seemed to let the blogging go fairly easily. This is over and he has joined with Molly Klein to be power-bloggers.
I see all of the blogger-identified entities as science fiction. There are people who also blog and seem relatively balanced–Jodi Dean and ktismatics–although they could become blogger-identified as well. As yet, they are still flesh and blood people that I don’t happen to know.
The fights on the blogs are only coincidentally about politics, they are mostly about ‘becoming-blogger’, so that Deleuze’s becomings can be seen in the blogs as a mostly ‘becoming-vermin.’ Once this is clear, blogging is seen to be a very small part of the internet. I personally didn’t have internet access regularly until 2003 and I got quickly involved with a chatroom where the chatters became involved with these depleted, flat relationships. By 2004, I’d already found the Weblog, and then the connections ot Molly Klein and Ryan and Dejan, who are all hard-core blogger-identified entities, which is to say extreme blog-addicts.
The turning point was Ryan Vu, who was a sci-fi object I met in person twice and who, in order to further himself, was able to pose as a non-blogger-addict for brief periods. By this past Saturday, he had pulled this identity away and had made his choice to be only a blogger, no matter what else he does. His writing is a simulacrum of high style without any of the spirit of it, which is the only reason he could trick me and the others couldn’t. The war is therefore only between me, standing alone, and Klein/Dejan/Vu, who stand together in blogging-identity. They are not talking about politics, they are blogger-insects. Dejan proved this by writing on Ryan Vu’s blog yesterday, and then deleting the comments I posted above. He is a manipulative little queen who wants to live in the blogosphere. As such, I see him as a piece of science fiction, and will write in print about this triad joined in their blogging addiction.
Other bloggers have thrown it off to some degree. The most intelligent, besides ktismatics perhaps, was Nick Land, who loves science fiction to the point of distraction and destruction. Ryan Vu used to write there, and present a persona of a confident, well-heeled, successful man-about-town that one could indeed think of as traxus, and who could not have been in more contrast to the socially deficient scrawny runt one met in person.
Dejan has become attached to me in a blog-sexual way which I am discarding. It it not what I do. I suppose he must have known I wouldn’t tolerate his deleting my comments about his ridiculous fears of Molly Klein. He became scared of her once before. And now he writes another woman for reassurance. I am tired of this pathological syndrome, and unfortunately ktismatics is now stuck with it. But he’s chosen to be a blogger too, at least he knows that ‘blogging is ugly.’ Some of the things Molly said about Dejan and his blogging habit may be true. But it should come as no surprise to him that I am not interested in virtual sex. He is, even if he has some of the real kind too. This is his train wreck and he can clean it up.
Ryan Vu is a blogger from the Twilight Zone. He has no personality outside the blog, and he knows it.
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‘Yes and all others will be deleted containing your narcissistic essays that bite your own partner’s ass;’
Well, it didn’t take long for you to see the truth, did it? You are not my partner, you gave that up yesterday by all your cowardly actions. But it’s better, because I am not interested in virtual fucking, and so you are now back in the good graces of Ryan and Molly.
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“I am not addicted to any online community, ”
Yes, you are. Kenoma/Molly was right about this, although she is too, as I’ve explained. Your meta-meta, etc., joke is less about the academics need for big cock than your own. For whatever reason, even if it’s just learned, they don’t want the big cock–it is quite immaterial whether some longing is in their unconscious or their ‘Real.’ You want it quite overtly, which is all right. But you have transferred much of this to your out-of-control online persona.
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This should interest ktismatics, although I doubt he’d have suffered from it. The whole business of ‘being partners’ as Dejan and I seemed to be is almost immediately dissolved with no residue at all, because the partnership depended purely on the electrons themselves. That is why, for someone like me, there is always a strange longing to meet the person I am talking to so seeming intimate on the internet–because the communication, unless it is purely a supplementary information-sharing thing such as I use at Ballet Talk, is not at all satisfying. For bloggers, this has come to seem satisfying, but I have never been able to make that leap. That’s why there are always endless talks about bloggers meeting each other, but why extreme bloggers like Richard Seymour (lenin) and Molly Klein do not meet usually–and when they do, it doesn’t seem natural, they talk about the blogs and they are more comfortable when they get back to the blogging and sense the buzz of the web again. However, usually they prefer to not meet at all, or they don’t think it’s very important when they do.
Blogging is not satisfying unless it can be done with no compromise, or when it can be done rather loosely as with ktismatics or jodi. Nick Land and Robin Mackay are actually very deep into sci-fi desire, and this, ktismatics, is something you should definitely keep in mind if you use this regularly: It is extremely unhealthy when used as a substitute, and can lead only to a sense that the virtual can be ignored at the expense of the real world, and the less said about that the better. After all, underneath is the haunting sensation that this is an admission of failure. k-punk would disagree, but he is very blogger-identified as well. It is mostly an escape, and is not usually used as I have been forced to use it–which is to exploit a set of characters and force them into being characters because they won’t be people. Neither ktismatics nor jodi are usable as people, nor is really Nick Land, because they are not especially blogger-identified. I even see a possible musical with nothing but bloggers behind screens singing their posts. This would be easy to do and nobody has done it yet. I’ve certainly got the characters, and best of all is Ryan Vu, who made sure the the World Was Made Safe for Blogging-Addiction.
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Darling go get some oral cultural product at the club and cool off, I can see you need a vacation. I don’t understand what you adumbrated about blogging-becoming but I have no problem separating fantasy from reality. As for having sex with you, I don’t understand how you expect to land handsome young Puertorican (or Serbian) product if you constantly BRAG. Furthermore I do NOT think you’re as butch top as you pretend in your online incarnation, more like a clever charmer. How DARE you accuse me of hiding behind Jodianne’s skirt when you’re practically plastered to her breasts, and an Oedipal case if there ever was one. I merely asked for legal advice because I want to be prepared to push the case further should MOLLY KLEIN become more vicious, and trust me, being completely neurastenic she IS capable of becoming more vicious. I could also accuse you of dumping your own unfinished shit (like your seduction of Childie) at the Parody center, forcing me to eat it, but I am much more generous than you are, Hedda you selfish histronic pianist cunt!!!
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‘and can lead only to a sense that the virtual can be ignored at the expense of the real world’
should read:
‘can only lead to a sense that the virtual can be fully embraced at the expense of all real-world concerns.’
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“As for having sex with you, I don’t understand how you expect to land handsome young Puertorican (or Serbian) product if you constantly BRAG.”
I didn’t ‘BRAG’ until I started producing in that realm, which has been relatively recently. I’ve already landed in the last 10 days an almost absurd amount, which is why I’ve started saying less. The people who brag are the ones who are saying it but who are not getting it. I had NOT been getting it. Then all of a sudden people wanted to suck me all the time, and I let several of them. It can sound like bragging, but even if it is, that’s not the same as making it up. None of the few I mentioned specifically were made up.
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trust me, being completely neurastenic she IS capable of becoming more vicious
Of course, she could SCARE your little pantywaist again, and apparently she will. Those emails you sent in which you said she and warszawa were going to call the New York police because I was psychotic and pathological were based on nothing but your paranoid stoned persona.
As for dumping ‘unfinished shit’ on your blog, blogging is all unfinished shit. That’s what’s different about it from formal writing. Ryan sees no difference either, though, and does carefully write his poison-worm posts. Molly does a more blog-writing kind of thing. Yours would have worked because it stood out from the rest, but you have mental illnesses that make it necessary for you to see shrinks again, as recommended by Molly Klein.
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but I have no problem separating fantasy from reality.
Whether you do or not is of no importance. You pretend they are not separated when it profits you, and then do a complete about-face when it doesn’t. You are that manipulative.
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“Furthermore I do NOT think you’re as butch top as you pretend in your online incarnation,”
I wasn’t until recently, and do agree that it’s strange for such physical ripening to happen at this age, but I don’t pretend to be a textbook case of much of anything.
I am not pretending to be a ‘butch top’ anyway, but rather a ‘versatile-butch’, which is what I am. That means I am by now about equally at home with all 4 basic roles, but only do these with guys who are close to me in physical type, although not precisely–in some cases, I might be charitable to one inferior, in others there might be something I want to ‘import’ from one I especially admire. In any case, I’m at ease with what it is I am, and can always perform creditably.
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your own unfinished shit (like your seduction of Childie)
I did not seduce Childie, although when I thought he was physical still, instead of blogger-identified, I found him attractive in a boyish way. Now that he’s shown he’s only a blogger, I see nothing tempting. In any case, I never made any physical pass, and technically only went along with your ‘top/bottom talk’ as a burlesque. As far as I’m concerned, he’s not gay. But whether or not, for me he’s a blogger.
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but I am much more generous than you are,
If you’re so generous, you should have left my remarks there, as I told you I had saved them and would publish them. It goes along with your blunders of the last few days. But the worst of these was writing on Ryan’s blog. That allowed him to recruit you back into the science fiction where you are now living.
I probably would like jodi in real life, but I am ‘plastered to her breasts’ only comparatively: I still her and ktismatics as science-fiction and bloggers, but less so. They could either be trusted with offline things. The rest of you can’t, and I’m sorry I wasted the postage on you cheap farts.
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Your meta-meta, etc., joke is less about the academics need for big cock than your own.
WELL OF COURSE! Hedda, you need more parodic training; if I didn’t have the same desire I could not get them to laugh at their own. But the point is what you DO with it – do you renounce pampering, being told what to do, or do you keep depending on the desire of the Other. This is what the whole satire is about, lazy bitch, and it’s not my fault that you don’t read carefully, underappreciating how brilliantly I combine it with theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and film criticism. (Which surprises me because in your book you have a similar approach)
Your bla-dibla about reality versus fantasy is boring, I explained 100 times that this boundary doesn;t exist since INLAND EMPIRE officially announced it, but you may choose to live in the 1950s if you want.
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Some of the things Molly said about Dejan and his blogging habit may be true. But it should come as no surprise to him that I am not interested in virtual sex. He is, even if he has some of the real kind too. This is his train wreck and he can clean it up.
That REAL SEX even exists is the stupidest thing you said so far – all sex is fantasy. Don’t you know what lacan said, c’n est pas un relation sexuel !
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If you’re so generous, you should have left my remarks there, as I told you I had saved them and would publish them.
No I shouldn’t have because you can’t REALLY tell me what to do, or patronize me. The remarks were moronic because you bite the hand that feeds you, and stop harping on it you’re not helping the war against MOLLY KLEIN.
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I found him attractive in a boyish way
Aha I see so your rage IS indeed inspired by rejection! Why do you project it on me, and on your work at the CPC?
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‘The remarks were moronic because you bite the hand that feeds you,’
You do not feed me, and those remarks contained the information you need if you needed to fight her, which you wrote me in your pussy-scared email. Then you got right over it when Jodi reassured you. You fucking woman, you even told her to use a secret hotmail account if she was worried about her security! You TOTAL asshole.
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“{That REAL SEX even exists is the stupidest thing you said so far – all sex is fantasy.”
So glad to hear another one of your authoritative pronouncements. I’m sure I’ll be so hauntologicalized I’ll never be able to get it up again. Are you getting it yet that you’ve really blown it with me?
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“you’re not helping the war against MOLLY KLEIN.”
There is no war against Molly Klein. You lost it yourself by sucking them off after they’d been defeated, you Serbian slut.
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“I found him attractive in a boyish way
Aha I see so your rage IS indeed inspired by rejection! ”
Not sexual rejection, because I didn’t find him anything beyond ornamental, some little slip of a girl to use for using as a massaging skin for your dick while lying down and pulling him over it. But I wouldn’t have wanted someone so inexperienced, since I prefer all the puertoricancultural product I’ve been getting by a long shot.
‘Rejection’ was purely artistic. I thought, despite all his meanness, that that was just ‘proud young man’ stuff. But after I wrote about his ‘high style’ and used the voice of one of my 2 best friends to compliment him, I was disappointed–but it was less rejection from someone I respected than disappointment at myself that I hadn’t recognized a White Trash Type in Asian-American garb when I saw it.
But you think what you want, I know you are just as Molly says you are, and I don’t care if she beats your ass. You deserve it. Ryan couldn’t beat me, and he knew he couldn’t, but it was not really important to do so, because you are the blogger, not me, so while less personally satisfying than if he could have bitten my dick off, it was practically speaking more wise to ally with an ugly cunt, suck her pussy, and defeat an emotionally unstable stalker-blogger.
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“No I shouldn’t have because you can’t REALLY tell me what to do, or patronize me.”
I can’t force you to do anything, that part’s true, so go listen to Gloria Gaynor sing ‘I Will Survive.’
By the way, I turned ‘Inland’ back in without watching it. I wouldn’t want to turn into a muffin like you.
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“I even see a possible musical with nothing but bloggers behind screens singing their posts. This would be easy to do and nobody has done it yet. I’ve certainly got the characters,”
I like that very much. You also have some textual product to turn into a libretto, but I suppose you’d have to get permission. I think you could surely generate your own lyrics based on the various writing styles you’ve sampled in the “real” blogs. (Not that I’m trying to distract you from your feud or anything; I really do think it’s a good idea.)
“Your bla-dibla about reality versus fantasy is boring, I explained 100 times that this boundary doesn;t exist”
Yes but there is the Real, and don’t you think face to face (or other body parts) encounters bring you into closer contact with the Real that underlies yet evades both Reality and Fantasy?
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“Yes but there is the Real, and don’t you think face to face (or other body parts) encounters bring you into closer contact with the Real that underlies yet evades both Reality and Fantasy?”
He knows that, ktismatics, but is in denial about his blog addiction. I’m making him go cold turkey due to slouching toward mediocrity.
‘You also have some textual product to turn into a libretto, but I suppose you’d have to get permission.’
I rather doubt you have to get permission from Arpege Chabert and Childie Klein-Vu, given that I would certainly use those, their real names, instead of RYAN VU and MOLLY KLEIN. Also I don’t think blog plagiarism is a seriously punishable offense, any more than publishing personal emails, addresses freely given, and offering illegal drugs through the mails…
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from american stranger:
Yes, you’re right, but their dynamic is hilarious, like Hamm and Clov. I predict it’ll be all over before they have a chance to hand out their awards.
by kenoma December 9, 2007 at 5:33 am
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I’m quite partial to realities/fantasies that drift off from the tangible: music, movies, fiction, etc. There’s definite theatrical value in blurring the boundaries between virtual and “Real” realities, but I find it disconcerting no matter what emotional valences are attached to the overlap. On the other hand, extended written correspondence between total strangers has always had a kind of Platonic romance associated with it, and in the Greek world the Ideal was the Real.
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‘Yes, you’re right, but their dynamic is hilarious, like Hamm and Clov. I predict it’ll be all over before they have a chance to hand out their awards.
by kenoma December 9, 2007 at 5:33 am’
I knew that was coming, nigger-woman, but you didn’t do Dejan in, he did. Fuckin’ cunt.
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“extended written correspondence between total strangers has always had a kind of Platonic romance associated with it, and in the Greek world the Ideal was the Real.”
Yes, but that isn’t what happens on the blogs. The blogs are about not having to communicate at all for the most part, and being able to pretend you talk about earth-shattering things and lofty revolutionary high-minded shit, while keeping your basic little identity totally unknown and in general having a cheap change-purse mind just like Arpege/Kenoma/Ryan Vu.
Actually, I like Dejan, of course. I’m just punishing him for atrocious behaviour. The others are truly filth and I think I will now recommence the war on them. Ryan Vu is so cheap he told me about our cyber-friend Nick Land’s book on Bataille, and told me he’d send it to me if I paid the postage, but also informed me that even withal, he wanted it back within 2 weeks. I have the email to prove this cheapskate-ism, and I WILL PUBLISH IT! I told him to go fuck himself.
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ktismatics–thanks for your tolerance. I have to put these last comments to dejan up here, because we are not going to continue our association. As such, it’s a triumph for MOLLY KLEIN, with whom dejan is obsessed much more than I am. These people are most dejan’s type than I am. Okay, take care.
# jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 12, 2007 at 7:18 pm
“it’s the God-honest truth that you had issues with Molly before you even met me, and the reason I want to emphasize that is the fact she’s been trying to construe a fantasy in which I am obsessed with HER and psychologically disturbed. This is insolent beyond words.”
I did, but I don’t care about them any more. I just emailed you that piece because you asked for it. But I don’t consider what she does to be any more insolent than your defense of Ryan Vu, whom you know has been totally insolent to me. And you think ‘it was good of him’, but you don’t think it was ‘insolent beyond words’ that he betrayed me and you in the article and that he banned us from his own blog. You want me to leave, I can understand that, because I want a more disciplined production. You want to have little emotional episodes in which you are cussing out the Cobra everywhere except sending her email-suckings and now you are writing posts that say ‘we are at war with Klein-Vus’ while defending the goodness of Ryan Vu after he slammed you, and this comes only days after you ’sincerely tried to reconcile with’ Molly, which makes no sense at all. How could I cooperate with you when you are so incapable of any kind of steadiness?
# jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 12, 2007 at 7:23 pm
‘Your article is good, but not finished; I will publish the complete version rather than half the text.’
Good, so it won’t be published, because it could only be done in a serial form. If you don’t like that, that’s all you get. It’s not like you’ve proved yourself to me. And why would you think that that is half the text? That was maybe 10 % of the story I would have written in installments, but you’re too much trouble, never wrote anything about my book and other works, and also wonder why you expect me not to be fond of being your hit man except when you’re in the mood to go down into their dark precincts and suck them.
The Kosovo thing you should just write for people who want to read it, not try to get converts from people who don’t like you. And they do NOT like you. It is becoming clear that, for the most part, you are attracted to people who do not like you, and that you are willing to beg for their affection.
# jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 12, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Oh well, I can live with the fact that Molly will be right that the parody center oscars will never be announced; or rather, they will be announced by you alone, which will take some of the thunder out of it, because nobody else really supports it in a professional sense. You keep trying to turn everything into this gemuttlich sort of thing, and the people you try hardest to appeal to gave that up ages ago.
‘we can’t use the same low-end tactics that Klein and her minions have used.’
That’s babyish. We use whatever works, including weapons of our own or weapons like theirs. I think you haven’t the stamina for this, though, and my departure will make it easier to sink back down into amateur theatricals.
# jonquille de camembert Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 12, 2007 at 7:36 pm
‘The fantasy hybrids and amalgams we create playing with these scattered bits of information is meant to engage people, stir up opinion, convince them of our messages.’
Yes, like imagining you have real friends in the blogs, because ‘The war is not about anything personal, really, and especially because I am not personally involved with either Molly or Ryan Klein-Vu,’
But in the same five minutes you’ve written: “Furthermore, it’s the God-honest truth that you had issues with Molly before you even met me, and the reason I want to emphasize that is the fact she’s been trying to construe a fantasy in which I am obsessed with HER and psychologically disturbed. This is insolent beyond words.”
So, is it ‘anything personal’ or is it not? Okay, I doubt you’ll publish these remarks either, so I’ll copy them and paste them because you do not seem professional enough for me to continue here. Nothing personal, you realize. I just don’t care to have my time wasted without compensation.
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‘As such, it’s a triumph for MOLLY KLEIN,’
Of course, it’s only a minor triumph, because it just doesn’t matter to me. If she wins, it hardly matters, because as Dejan says (when he can’t remember that he just said the opposite) ‘it’s not personal.’ What it IS is unprofessional, and therefore boring.
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“What it IS is unprofessional, and therefore boring.”
It’s been a lot of things Jonquille, but rarely has it been boring. I’m not fully convinced the partnership is disbanded once and for all. Either way I’ve enjoyed your skewed brilliance as well as our exchanges. I hope you’ll stop in from time to time — assuming ktismatics doesn’t REALLY die before long. I am now going to order your book for my Christmas present.
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Thanks, ktismatics, you’re a love.
Yes, it’s over, Dejan really made the decision yesterday by deleting those comments of mine. I should have seen that as the end, because even Molly doesn’t delete me. Then he praised Ryan, who had long been campaigning against me, which would make some sense if he did not ‘declare war on the Klein-Vu’s’. Anyway, he wrote me an email which said that the high-pitched tone wasn’t working for the commercial needs of the blog. It’s probably that what I talked about here yesterday about the ‘blogger-identification’ is so true to many of the fiercest bloggers that it has caused a configuration of a sort I wouldn’t have been able to imagine until Ryan demonstrated it by writing what was outwardly in an old style of journalism, and is still to be found at the New York Review of Books–but I should not have thought it was the same thing just because of the appearance of it.
In choosing to champion Ryan and delete me, Dejan has found a way to sustain his relationship with Molly. In no way will he ever be in the ‘winner’ position, and my problem in perceiving this sort of thing is that I think the ‘loser’, which is clearly Dejan when it comes to Molly, would WANT to win. And, of course, I think that because that’s what I want. That’s why in the leftist blogosphere I don’t care if they call me Nazi, racist, sexist, everything, and I’ll even use the vocabulary of all those things if it benefits me against these puerile children. But, of course, I do win for myself because my current book has much to do with this kind of thing, and there may be some additions for sections I call ‘BlogSpace’ in the first chapters, but the remaining ones are about the reclaiming of offline space, which I achieved by writing myself back into it with the First Chapter, and my winning essentially consists of knowing how to limit the online experience very severely–it’s not a matter of defeating particular bloggers. The ones I described to you as most blogger-identified are already in a state of defeat. I can see that you are too long settled into your own offline life for that to happen to you, but I don’t know about Jodi, who also has enough ‘gravity’ off the computer to force her off for long periods. I have had to discipline myself, because I consider it a drug. But the reshapings, such as is found in Ryan’s work, I had not been aware of until the other day. In that essay, he was actively choosing the blogging sensibility over something he obviously considered less valuable: Actually, that’s good for me to know, because I’ll never take a chance on a blogger-identified type again.
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Very honoured you’d order my book with Christian Pellet.
I should add that in the work-in-progress, I’d already written through the BlogSpace back into offline space with the use of another online board, Ballet Talk, where that’s not the only subject, and I met bourgeois types more like me who are not interested in talking only about how art works in social and political theories and ideologies. Of course, theorists are people of whom one could say ‘he who cannot do, theorises.’ So that the remaining 4 chapters presuppose that, for myself at least, there is no longer a problem of online phenomena, and I go ahead and talk about things that are in the past and which are very palpable still, but only mature into their living beings by now, almost like Proust’s remembered things. A period in New York in 1975 was so painful that until I found a written structure within which to write about it, even though subsumed by things like love affairs, gold French mirrors now turned into frames for erotic paintings, etc., I could not grasp that most significant period in my life. What is very peculiar is that when you can finally stay with an old ‘most painful’ experience until you get it ‘to reactivate’, the result is the very opposite of pain–the very sense of inaccessibility, now replaced, becomes the rarest perfume.
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Just continuing slightly, because Book III ( I call the chapters in the new book ‘Books’) was written last, and still not quite finished. Books II and IV are both involved with what I found offline after freeing myself from the addiction with Book I and with Ballet Talk (which as I mentioned, has people who use the board for discussion, and they are cordial and even sometimes meet–a NYCB ballerina tried to pick me up till she found I was gay–but they never are an ‘online community’ as such, with seemingly emotional involvements such as you’ve recently witnesseed here). By the time of Book II, which is in extremely rough second draft, I don’t even allude to the blog experience as having anything but a subsumed effect, although this has to be actively maintained, and hard splits have to be effected; I just go on with the things I had lost, in some ways for quite some years, which had first been very pronounced from reading some of Zizek’s idiotic intonings about the power of the virtual, as well as Baudrillard and Virilio. There is a peculiar pleasure in this sci-fi projection, and again, I find that most of the bloggers are quite tellingly involved with sci-fi. I’m not. Even so, I found media studies gripping in a ‘subtle sci-fi’ way that I had to pay attention to until I proved for myself that yes, much of it was evolving and very fast, but that there were many ways of resisting this besides just Vulgar Marxism such as espoused by Seymour, Klein and Vu, and that much of it was futurized anyway, and not here yet. But the pleasure comes from feeling it as if it WERE here, despite being in the future, and so on.
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‘Jonquille, I will not be requiring your services in this period; you should take your vacation and rest, then you can think about what you want from the Parody Center. I don’t want to continue the same high pitched tone because it’s died down somewhat. Apparently the bomb hit really hard,
and everybody is a little dazed. There is not enough baiting and it sounds forced.’
Anyway, this was the ‘firing notice’, and so totally blogger-identified that I wouldn’t be caught dead in there again. I don’t have a taste for this kind of flabby thinking, so he can indulge his and Ryan’s taste for Molly. You see, I think Dejan thought I also had a taste for her. I don’t. She is as ridiculous as he says, but he goes back for more. In my case, if we don’t use her as a piece of fiction to turn into a money-making venture, it is of no interest. Molly Klein, the human being, is one of the most unattractive I’ve ever run into. I’m relieved he didn’t like the piece I tossed off, because I didn’t want to write it in the first place.
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Being off the grid occupied by the high-theory bloggists I’ve not been part of the interdependencies that give it the aura of a gnostic sect with different levels of awareness like concentric circles of heaven, giving the outsider both the clear sense of being out and a perverse desire to be in even when there’s nothing to be gained by it. The actual discussions of substance seem to happen elsewhere, if at all. I still can’t quite figure out the point of the whole blogging enterprise. If I were to write a “Tribute to CPC — the Jonquille Era,” as a sort of epitaph, I’d talk about how my favorite part of the performance was when you two completely distanced yourselves from the content and focused exclusively on the affect, which gives all the discussions undertones of competition and hostility. To distill the essence of that bile has been the art, I feel.
I too need to get back to writing book-length work. I get a sense that at least some of the bloggers use the posts to build writing momentum that will enable them to write a full-length thesis, novel, etc. I came to blogging after having grown accustomed to the long form, and I find I like the opportunity to allow an idea to unfold and expand, then in editing to distill and mellow, rather than always having to cut it short and move on to the next topic. For quite some time I successfully resisted exposure to popular culture and contemporary trends, trying to find unexplored territories that maybe only I could see. Internet jabber gives me the sense of moving quickly but always being a step slow, which isn’t particularly conducive to getting anything good accomplished. It sounds like your current book takes you out of the contemporary scene into a more meaningful era for you, which requires a similar resistance to the “specious present.” I quit this blog before and allowed myself to slide back into it — maybe you’ll prove my inspiration for being resolute the next time I quit.
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Dad, my correspondent has been temporarily dismissed so that he can get some Puertorican cultural product in a more relaxed environment. Such internal disputes are quite common amongst comedy writers, and he´ll be back before you can say ´´Molly Klein´´. I do understand both of you´s concerns about the writing aspect, but since I am not a professional writer or working on a book, I can´t say I identify with them. I like journalism a lot, and blogging also adds interactivity to the experience which I still find fascinating and unique. Dad I agree quite that parody is best in completely delirious and affective mode, paying no respect to any sensibilities, but the truth is Jonquille´s article on Molly was anything but, it was lame and tepid. He used to say far more vicious things in the comments boxes.
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‘maybe you’ll prove my inspiration for being resolute the next time I quit.’
Well, it’s just obvious that you COULD do without it, I’ve slid back in, but being without a literal blog, I was allowed a lot of freedom because I could write.
As far as trying out things in blog writing that they then try to work into books or published articles, I think that is true of many of the blog writers, although I never combine the two. I don’t even type onto a Word document at first, but rather hand-write everything, and the second draft is then typed in. By then, I am not being sped along with too-fast thoughts by the computer itself.
“It sounds like your current book takes you out of the contemporary scene into a more meaningful era for you, which requires a similar resistance to the “specious present.””
That’s what it FIRST did. What surprised me as it pushed itself along was that I was no longer totally hostile to much of contemporary culture anymore, because what would have seemed impossible did occur: I could carry the older modes within myself so that my perception of contemporary culture was itself transformed into something less negative–at least when it definitely was, as when I recently found great Broadway scores had still been written in the last 12 years, as in the case of Cy Coleman’s ‘The Life’ and Marc Holmann’s ‘Urinetown’, and I had not thought anything comparable to the classics was being turned out, that it was only ‘Phantom of the opera’ and Disney, etc. Also when I started listening to the Dixie Chicks, who are unlike anything from the past–they are simply so good that I stand agape, startled that they have this rich sound.
‘I’d talk about how my favorite part of the performance was when you two completely distanced yourselves from the content and focused exclusively on the affect, which gives all the discussions undertones of competition and hostility.’
I think that’s accurate, although probably simply the quickest way to describe it so that it’s comprehensible. But it’s a good bit more than that, because the things I’ve described to you in the new book that you pick up on pretty closely, were well-known to Ryan Vu, so that once he turned totally against me there could be no compromise on my part: In other words, he could not just toy with them as is his wont, he had to embrace or repudiate. He chose to repudiate, and in doing so, I had to reject everything about him, once so much recipient of my appreciation, turning it into a complete and total rejection of everything he stands for. This is curious, because it is more the core of it than my conflict with Dejan, and Dejan knew that. You see, Ryan has read the first chapter of my book, and knows what I’m working toward. He has more recently continued to attack everything I’ve stood for, and I was able to overlook it until the last one. Dejan knows this, but also didn’t like it that Molly said I was ‘running things at CPC’, so he has actually wanted me out of there since at least yesterday and probably Monday, when I became disgusted at the drama-queen number of getting legally afraid of Molly. He also, in his letter to Jodi asking for advice, described it as ‘I let Patrick publish Molly’s address’, although legally speaking he published it, because he moderates comments–as his deletion of comments by me he doesn’t like proves.
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‘but the truth is Jonquille´s article on Molly was anything but, it was lame and tepid.’
That’s of no importance, you just say that because you’ve been defeated by your own ineffectuality. And calling John ‘Dad’ is really repellent.
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I don’t even type onto a Word document at first, but rather hand-write everything, and the second draft is then typed in.
I should also say that I never write about the things I hand-write on the blogs. Maybe that’s why my tiny piece on Molly (no more than a page that took 10 minutes to dash off) is ‘lame and tepid’ (it probably is, but certainly no worse than his pitiful current Blog Buzz, which has nothing at all going for it), because I did think of trying to handwrite it, but realized that really would be eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which is to say, I was Dejan’s Dildo insofar as I could have enough real sex on the outside. I can still have that, and he can look elsewhere for dildoes.
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“I like journalism a lot, and blogging also adds interactivity to the experience which I still find fascinating and unique.”
I will continue to subscribe to your parodic cultural product whatever direction it goes from here — or at least until I swear off blogs entirely.
“What surprised me as it pushed itself along was that I was no longer totally hostile to much of contemporary culture anymore, because what would have seemed impossible did occur: I could carry the older modes within myself so that my perception of contemporary culture was itself transformed into something less negative”
I expect to find the same thing to be true. I never set foot on a blog until about a year and a quarter ago, and it is addictive I agree. When I quit the blog the first time I was going to stick to commenting, but I was surprised to find myself interested enough in certain topics to start posting again. Plus I’ve been posting regularly at a Christian blog, so my workload increased in the afterlife. I must put a stop to this slavery.
Why did Traxus want to meet you in the first place, if you don’t mind saying?
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Dejan knows this, but also didn’t like it that Molly said I was ‘running things at CPC’, so he has actually wanted me out of there since at least yesterday and probably Monday, when I became disgusted at the drama-queen number of getting legally afraid of Molly.
I will repeat for the last time, and if you continue to counter me you can just fuck off, that I am not afraid of Molly, but that our correspondence contains information which I never wanted to see published. I am not going to die or even be embarrassed if it´s published, but this is information pertaining to my dearest and nearest. Because you see, the snake really did trick me at the very outset of our short-lived friendship, and I was talking to her honestly as I usually do with my friends. This is something you know nothing about, because you weren´t there, and hence even more irritating that you keep harping on it. I´m not pissed at Molly just like that, just because she has erroneous Communist views, but because she is a really vile personality. And your article doesn´t reflect the vileness, it´s just vaudeville.
He also, in his letter to Jodi asking for advice, described it as ‘I let Patrick publish Molly’s address’, although legally speaking he published it, because he moderates comments–as his deletion of comments by me he doesn’t like proves.
And who exactly is Jodi in this instance, a Southern Divinity that she may not be asked questions, or do you perhaps have a blawg monopoly on Jodi? If you want to have dad responsibilities and pimp me around blogs, then you must also live up to them. I was far more generous in sharing you with my blawg patrons, including Clysmatics.
ou see, Ryan has read the first chapter of my book, and knows what I’m working toward. He has more recently continued to attack everything I’ve stood for, and I was able to overlook it until the last one.
Actually the real reason that I don´t want to go further on Ryan is that he sent me an email in the meantime responding to my question as to why exactly he treated you with such contempt saying that you had a very pleasant afternoon and that you were charming. And nothing further, not a glimmer of abuse. If you wish I can send you a copy, though I promised I wouldn´t, because after all the email is addressed to me. In this sense I feel that your pinning down your rage on me. So if you want to talk about this you´re going to have to write your own essay on it, signed ´´Jonquille de Camembert´´. Anycase I already offered you access to the Parody Center but being the lazy bum that you are you didn´t even bother to learn how to enter your username and password, and darling that my fault isn´t.
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He also, in his letter to Jodi asking for advice, described it as ‘I let Patrick publish Molly’s address’, although legally speaking he published it, because he moderates comments–as his deletion of comments by me he doesn’t like proves.
You´re manipulating: I don´t have Molly´s address, only her phone number. She never gave it to me, I didn´t ask for it as at some point I completely dropped the idea of visiting her in Paris, which was once a plan. And I did resist your multiple threats, sent to her via the Parody Center or directly, to publish the address. When she filled the glass completely by publishing our correspondence, I decided to repay her in kind, and as you can see did not delete your comment containing Molly´s address. It is still available to readers who might wish to visit the whorehouse. I don´t usually dabble in this kind of play, because I find it less interesting than direct confrontation. I don´t see how in all this you are my dildo, when we are actually a 2-way parodic dildo, and much as you are now experiencing your PMS and denying it, it´s a robust dildo that will continue to fuck the audiences for a long time to come.
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´´bloggers don´t like me´´
Jonquille, there are some bloggers who like me, or they wouldn´t be linking up to the CPC. But in fact I don´t want them to LIKE me, I want them to get into arguments with me, because the best things are born out of antagonisms and arguments,that is just how blogging works and you and Clysmatics may find that incompatible with your more oldfashioned ways, but it is a legitimate new form of journalism, activism, writing. This is one aspect where Ryan disappointed me dreadfully, his embrace of the ´´decline of symbolic efficacy´´ theory whereby he repidiated precisely this political, active aspect of blogging, explained it away by means of the Spectacle Society theory, even as he recognized it sooner than anybody else, acknowledging that the CPC did have an effect. This is so typical for his generation´s iPod conformism and cooperation with the ´´entertainment society´´, against which you are complaining justifiably. In other words I completely don´t mind it that he wrote an article massacring the CPC, I applaud it in fact, what angered me is how in the article he took the side of the stupid old Communists and their pompous Spectacle Society theories, aping and imitating Molly Klein´s mediocre and incomplete criticism of dr. Zizek.
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That and Ryan´s conciliatory, Nirvana, Pollyanna, Buddhist harmony apologetic discourse which indeed like a tranny bottom´s ass sometimes turns into vicious backstabbing and clenched teeth, his lack of resistance namely, is what irritated me about the article, and not so much the encounter that for this reason or another injured your Queen´s narcissism.
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if you continue to counter me you can just fuck off,
I have fucked off, dear. What did you think had occurred?
I will answer each little bauble as I come to it, and then try to get back to John’s interesting comment.
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“the best things are born out of antagonisms and arguments, that is just how blogging works and you and Clysmatics may find that incompatible with your more oldfashioned ways,”
This dialectical propensity may be a holdover from your continental Communistic childhood, Dejan. The Deleuzian alternative is a European emulation of good-old-fashioned American pragmatism, not in the mechanistic instrumental rationality variant but in its emphasis on multistranded emergence.
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And your article doesn´t reflect the vileness, it´s just vaudeville.
Who gives a fuck about that article. My heart was hardly in it, I did it as a favour for you, and it was only an introduction for what would have been perhaps 10 installments. An intro is supposed to be evanescent, ephimeral, an efflorescence of lightest incandescence. I’m sorry you have no further weapons than to keep harping on something you ordered me to do and I only whipped up on the spot–you know, like a ham sandwich in white bread, not even quite an omelette with a bit too much salt.
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“Anycase I already offered you access to the Parody Center but being the lazy bum that you are you didn´t even bother to learn how to enter your username and password, and darling that my fault isn´t.”
I tried to do it, and asked you why it didn’t work. You said to forget it and just continue as usual. I don’t know why you want to be so vituperative about this, as you seem to be doing quite well without me. After all, it’s been about 5 hours since you fired me, and you’re already only merely foaming.
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“If you wish I can send you a copy, though I promised I wouldn´t, because after all the email is addressed to me.”
Of course not, darling, I am not interested in reading any more of Ryan’s ad copy.
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“I decided to repay her in kind, and as you can see did not delete your comment containing Molly´s address. It is still available to readers who might wish to visit the whorehouse.”
But that came after YOU revealed her name. So you started the ‘dabbling in that kind of play’. So what?
Your nonchalance under the circumstances is staggering. I’m just deeeee-vah-stated, ah thaynk ah’m ‘on get the va-puhs..
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“when we are actually a 2-way parodic dildo, and much as you are now experiencing your PMS and denying it, it´s a robust dildo that will continue to fuck the audiences for a long time to come”
Yes, types like Ryan just LOOOOOVE to go through blog archives…
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“In other words I completely don´t mind it that he wrote an article massacring the CPC, I applaud it in fact, what angered me is how in the article he took the side of the stupid old Communists and their pompous Spectacle Society theories, aping and imitating Molly Klein´s mediocre and incomplete criticism of dr. Zizek.”
I have no interest in what you feel about Ryan or his atrocious work. Why don’t you hire him? When you start having withdrawals from your imagined two-pronged dildo with me, maybe you can get the little adder to connect up a little cable so you two can live your blogger-identities and be as ‘blissfully married’ as Molly Klein is to her English husband. You might even get a little fried rice.
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“his lack of resistance namely, is what irritated me about the article, and not so much the encounter that for this reason or another injured your Queen´s narcissism.”
I do find it astonishing that you think I would care whether you felt something upsetting about Ryan’s piece. I don’t give a flying fuck what you think, and there is no ‘injured Queen’s narcissism’, because I have suffered from that before. The reason is exactly as I told John, that I don’t want to live online and I don’t. In the moment of the Ryan Vu Cultural Product, we finally did get a clear version of where he stands, although this is not because the writing was the perfect vehicle for, doing nothing but every kind of slippery move all over the place–but we separated 100% from ever having any further contact, because I was forced to choose my offline domains with a vengeance that didn’t have to be so defined before, and he chose to be as fully virtualized as he could. This would give me the belief that people of his generation could ONLY make this choice, but that’s not so: Not all young men are eunuchs like Ryan and you, and there are even young women besides the Dixie Chicks who still behave as if there was something going on besides screens. They don’t sit on their asses all day.
I know some bloggers like you, I was referring to Molly, who does not. But whether you are afraid of her or not, I am not concerned, you are obsessed with her. Anyway, you ARE afraid of her, or you wouldn’t have written that totally ASSHOLE letter to Jodi about your fears of being thrown into Guantanamo Bay by Molly Klein.
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John–if I get time over the next few days, I’ll send you an email about knowing Ryan from the Hyperstition blog. I think I’ve written most of this up already, but I don’t know where it is.
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‘This dialectical propensity may be a holdover from your continental Communistic childhood, Dejan. The Deleuzian alternative is a European emulation of good-old-fashioned American pragmatism, not in the mechanistic instrumental rationality variant but in its emphasis on multistranded emergence.’
That’s most interesting, and sounds fresh, I hadn’t thought of Deleuze as being imitative of American pragmatism, but that’s a wonderful new addition, because he naturally frenchifies americanism, and that’s a dynamite combination.
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“as his deletion of comments by me he doesn’t like proves.”
Whatever…about anything else. If you deleted comments from me because you didn’t find them flattering to you, why do you think I would continue with you in any form other than to explain it to John, who is pretty even-tempered and seems to find the case interesting. As for any further interaction with you on developing new work, that’s no longer on the table. You’re OUT.
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Jonquille, go visit Molly Klein´s blog and witness the fruits of your labor. I am not going to interfere.
What you accomplished with this thread is that audiences will now think you are this vulgar and rude misanthropic queen, to borrow Comrade Fox´s homophobic expression, whereas I am this weak and obsessive computer nerd.
War is not only lost, but there is humiliation on top of it.
I must say I respect your parodic talent so much that I would rehire you, but you are going to have to be VERY NICE after this.
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Okay, I will look at it, but NO MATTER WHAT the cooze has said, you will CONDEMN RYAN VU’s reaction and alliance with Molly Klein if you want me to have anything to do with you. There is no policy without condemnation of BOTH 100%, and an end to your grovelling ways around Molly. Just because your history isn’t the same with RYAN VU as mine is does not mean you have the right to ignore everything I say to do about him. That is like if I told you that material about Yugoslavia is negligible and I paid no attention to it. I have been paid attention to it. RYAN VU said I was ‘charming’, not only because I obviously AM, but because he was trying to manipulate and is a piece of cunnilingus hound.
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“War is not only lost, but there is humiliation on top of it.”
So what do you do, invent a new crisis to stimulate yourself every day? Profoundly NOTHING of interest is going on over there, the same old fucking shit. The ONLY interest is we see RYAN VU post-op, talking about how ‘it’s getting very serious over there.’ And YOU lost whatever war is lost, so go over there and wave your white flag of SURRENDER, you spineless creep. I lost nothing, what those blogger-identified creeps are doing is of no interest to me, even though the snow is impeding some of my more pressing concerns.
“I must say I respect your parodic talent so much that I would rehire you, but you are going to have to be VERY NICE after this.”
Fuck you. I wouldn’t work for a mass of quivering jelly again, who makes dramas where there is nothing but a few little worms twisting around under a microscope, if you PAID me for it. Grow fucking up.
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I don’t know why that came through as Radio Free Europe, which I hadn’t used for weeks.
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Dejan, I do NOT want the password to the Parody Center by now, is that clear? You cannot fight, you blew it by acting petulant and refusing to include RYAN VU in the ‘triumvirate’ and you say ‘the war is lost and humiliation as well’ when all it is is THREE MAGGOTS sucking each others’ pussies. You IDIOT!
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Why don’t you call MOLLY KLEIN and see if she can supply some of RYAN VU’s supply of VALIUM? You know, if you tell her how you ‘had a crush on her’, I’m sure she’d reconsider, as well as accepting your proposal for a grant as cartoonist. She is loathsome, but YOU are one of THEM, and you cannot defeat me either. So the WAR’s dynamics have changed. Go dive into the mud puddle with them, you like it there, and maybe you’ll get a nematode from drinking the polluted water. They have nothing but an old-fashioned Ladies’ Study Club over there. Admittedly, I did not know RYAN VU was going to become a woman, but I do know it now, so why not YOU?
I’m sticking to John and Jodi for the occasional blog moment once I’ve gotten shed of you and your infernal infantilism.
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Having read the latest thread on Le Colonel Chabert I’ve concluded that it’s meant to be a parody of the Parody Center, using similar tactics to bait the “enemy” into either defending themselves or retaliating. I’ve learned through personal experience on the Parody Center that either move is self-defeating. But I will watch if someone rises to the bait.
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…which I just did — dang it!
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multistranded emergence.
but your multistranded emergence sells poorly. You said you had 200 hits per day during peaks, I´ve been having 300/500 routinely, 600 to 900 on peak days. In fact if Jonquille wasn´t such a narcissistic bitch I would have asked her shortly to create something together that isn´t just catering to Molly Klein´s market, a sellable kind of parody. But the bitch is now in MYSPACE mode – MY life, MY ego, MY opinion, MY fight with Ryan…
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No question the feud sells better than my usual fare — ktismatics had its highest weekly hit total ever this week. Note also that my last two posts have received a total of one comment, which was WRITTEN BY ME, whereas this post has over 100 comments, and it’s the topic of discussion on at least one other blog. I think you said once that you get more hits on your particularly virulent posts than when you’re more cerebral. It’s spectacle, baby!
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His problem is that he suffers from A.D.D. and total lack of concentration, which is why I’m not going to bother. This is what I told you about blogger-identified types. They depend on it, if not to the exclusion of everything else, then it still dominates things. First the biscuit fires me, then defends all the villains, then says ‘we’ve lost and been humiliated’, when only HE has, I’ve won by paying no attention to such trash. nevermind that, though, she then begs me to come back, giving me the password, if I’ll ‘just be nice this time’. My rejection of all her BISCUIT offers prompts her to say that I’m in MySpace, because she has no referents except offline.
I keep forgetting, yes the avatar is too small, is that Dick Clark? He’s not quite as sophisticated as George Hamilton, but same emphasis on slickness. Still, looked good when young.
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My rejection of all her BISCUIT offers prompts her to say that I’m in MySpace, because she has no referents except offline.
should read:
‘has no references except ONLINE.’ Cannot go out of the fucking HOUSE!
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” i thought you (both) were being mean to ktismatics,”
I don’t know that there’s a really good reason to be nice to people who propagandise for the innocence of US policy makers right now. I don’t feel they are harmless – i don’t buy the dumb bumpkin act.”
There’s tiny Childie Klein-Vu testing the waters now that he’s been accepted into the sorority. Watch the Mighty Mouse push harder! Let him fight for the right, the little runt! Molly Klein can now enjoy her favourite pastime, which is finding people who are actually nice like John Doyle and saying that, due to Communist bullshit, she is justified in being ‘un-nice’ to him. You gotta luv this CUNT!
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It’s Ward Cleaver from the Leave It To Beaver TV show. I selected it in hopes of getting style points for a parody award. But it creeps me out, so I think I’ll go back to the detail of Zampano’s motorcycle that I was using before.
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God, this is the BEST OF ALL! Although I don’t know what they are talking about with the ‘A & F prof’ stuff, except they mean Jodi.
“you may not know but jodi dean and patrick mullins are both white people from Alabama.
décembre 13, 2007 7:56 PM
kenoma said…
you may not know but jodi dean and patrick mullins are both white people from Alabama.
That figures – and one can imagine just how well Zizek would fit in with the good ole boys of the deep south, what with his repertoire of jocular observations on the penises of black men.”
That’s total bullshit, the good ole boys have NO appreciation of black penis. I have had MUCH experience with it, you can’t get away with making out with good BlackCulturalProduct all that easily in Alabama. I had some about 3 months ago, and I’m sure Zizek DIDN’T.
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I think Traxus does buy my dumb bumpkin act — or it might be part of the parody.
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It’s spectacle, baby!
Yes it´s spectacle, but SO WHAT – do you get my point? The way Jonquille is reasoning, this leads to some kind of intellectual and physical rot, a kind of solipsism, being out of touch with ´´reality´´, pussified, made passive. But there is no reality! It´s been a spectacle all along – multiple reality levels. You can SWIM THROUGH the spectacle. This is what the Parody Center showed to the academic balwgosphere, of which Ryan Vu is horribly jealous. He prefers to whine about the dekline in simbolik efikasy, because this way he has an excuse for the fact that his stuff is unfunny, moralistic and just as dry as the academic work he is ´´attacking´´. Not to mention that it doesn´t hit any political buttons at all, despite Ryan´s professed progressiveness.
That’s total bullshit, the good ole boys have NO appreciation of black penis. I have had MUCH experience with it, you can’t get away with making out with good BlackCulturalProduct all that easily in Alabama. I had some about 3 months ago, and I’m sure Zizek DIDN’T.
What a lame and moderately funny excuse for jumping straight into the Cobra´s jaws with your unwise, rash and extremist attack on your very own parody partner. And all this after I defended you in front of everyone saying that you are no vile Republican, that you are not a psychotic aggressive bitch and that I don´t give a fuck about their criticisms of you. For this you thank me by going all prissy and hurting my bottom sensibilities to boot. Well go suck that black cultural product, obviously that´s all you care about: SUCKING.
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His problem is that he suffers from A.D.D.
yes I do and, SO WHAT? You suffer from your Alabama provincial boy trapped in a big city complex. We all have complexes. I never attack your own, but you´re constantly jumping on mine. And that ADD accusation by the way is the core of Molly Klein´s propaganda. Supposedly I have no patience to read the 389103810 pages of her dense text.
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Cannot go out of the fucking HOUSE!
You sour and crass bitch, I told you several million times at least that the Dutch have a couch potato culture. After 19 o clock in Holland you can only go to a gym, a seedy leather bar or to a PRIVATE party – but then the Dutch don´t party much either. Combined with the fact that every job nowadays involves a lot of computer sitting, the result is that there is little opportunity to experience anything OUTSIDE. I don´t like this any better than you do, but on the other hand it´s not my fault or my preference or something. The area where I live, which is like the City in London, is also very reserved, detached, unfriendly to strangers. You don´t just get to meet people just like that.
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300 hits!
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“Well go suck that black cultural product, obviously that´s all you care about: SUCKING.”
Hardly, but I have nothing against it. Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, you’re only making yourself seem even more like the coward who put a wig on so he could escape with the women in the boats when the Titanic was sinking. You did not defend me NEARLY as much as I defended you, and I am in NO way in Molly’s jaws. What you don’t like is that I have left you at last to fend for yourself. And by the way, it was not that you wrote Jodi as ‘southern spotless-woman’, but that you were so paranoid you wrote ANYBODY about something so infinitesimal as a blog betrayal.
I can just see you and Arpege in the Internation Tribunal at the Hague as she accuses you and me of ‘crimes against humanity’. I expect the jury sentence will be for YOU to have to pay the fine of ONE ROLL OF SOVIET TOILET PAPER to ARPEGE KLEIN and RYAN VU, and serve 10 minutes of confinement in the Ladies Bathroom on the Court Premises.
“yes I do and, SO WHAT?”
I didn’t know you actually had it. In any case, your inability to focus on your declaration of war makes it impossible to take it seriously. If you have A.D.D., that still doesn’t mean you have to declare war on maggots and then go jump in their Prole Swimming Hole with them.
“You suffer from your Alabama provincial boy trapped in a big city complex.”
Honey, there is NO suffering in something as rarefied and beautiful as that. Surely you must be aware of this by now.
“You sour and crass bitch, I told you several million times at least that the Dutch have a couch potato culture.”
So is the U.S., you idiot, even more so than anyplace in Europe, because people drive 2 blocks unless they make a special effort. All Commies, of which you are decisively a fucking COMMIE YOURSELF, blame all their problems on ‘the world’ and ‘the state’, and you sit around just like Arpege Klein and whimper into your Kleenexes. ANY area is a place you can WALK in, you dumb fuck. You don’t have to MEET SOMEONE every time you go out. Stop acting like Edna Turnblad.
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I don´t have any official diagnosis of ADD, but there are certainly ADD elements in the way I am conditioned by the media culture to quickly lose patience for deep pursuits. I don´t know anyone who uses the internet that doesn´t have ADD type deformities. The system forces us to have them, otherwise we can´t survive it. In my new job it´s all about fucking MULTI TASKING. There is no mention of deeper processes, such as thinking. However, unlike you, I don´t see this as only a disadvantage. You are given to extremist thinking and it is THIS which draws you to Molly Klein, despite your sad attempts to deny it. How did she get YOUR phone number if you weren´t trying to suck on her cock, you hypocritical MATA HARI???
I never denied the fact that Molly drew me into her vulval vortex. If she didn´t, I would not have even bothered to comment or talk to her uberhaupt. But there´s nothing wrong with Jewish temperament per se, what´s wrong is the CHARACTER DEFECT, the IMMORAL FLAW at the center of her repulsive wimman personality! This I only came to discover later.
Anyway, having read Ryan Vulva´s latest comments I think I fully agree with your assessment, and the bitch better be forewarned that he will NOT be excused from merciless treatment, whether on my own or in a tandem with you.
Surely you must be aware of this by now.
There´s nothing wrong with it that is until you start talking about Halliwud salon cultural product, and how you came in your Alabama panties when you saw all that GLITZ on Hairspray. In those moments my Communist genes are awakened and I want to shit right in the middle of the music hall, wearing my most expensive tuxedo.
ANY area is a place you can WALK in, you dumb fuck.
There is indeed a whole complex of pathways right next to my home, but there is nobody there. Anyhow quit patronizing me with this sporting advice, what the fuck are you trying to say?
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And by the way, it was not that you wrote Jodi as ’southern spotless-woman’, but that you were so paranoid you wrote ANYBODY about something so infinitesimal as a blog betrayal.
You VAGUE QUEEN! Didn´t you notice that Jodi delivered a deadly post that does more for the War against the Axis of Evil than all the histronics you spilled in my dad´s lap tonight.
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‘Didn´t you notice that Jodi delivered a deadly post’
I no longer care about your ADD problems. She made this post after all of your repulsive blunders. Stop trying to suck me through the screen, you desperate fool.
“nd it is THIS which draws you to Molly Klein, despite your sad attempts to deny it. How did she get YOUR phone number if you weren´t trying to suck on her cock, you hypocritical MATA HARI???”
Here again, you totally ignore time. I don’t even know how you know what fucking year it is. Of COURSE, you asshole sans pareil, I WAS interested in her before she pulled the VALIUM NUMBER. Can’t you follow any chronology at all? Did you realize that people change their minds about people sometimes?
Anyway, it’s you who went and drank maggot juice in the filthhole, you don’t know that praising Jodi in there is EXACTLY the same as shitting in your CHEAP TUXEDO, you COMMUNIST!
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Stop trying to suck me through the screen
Ok granddad, I won´t. I hope you last another five or so years before the black cultural product turns you down for SOMETHING YOUNGER. We might meet in a few decades on a sex chatting site, though, but I´d appreciate it if you didn´t chastise me on virtualities then, you Thatcherite MORALIST.
Of COURSE, you asshole sans pareil, I WAS interested in her before she pulled the VALIUM NUMBER. Can’t you follow any chronology at all?
So why are you reprimanding me for being interested in her then before she pulled the FEMINIST number?
Speaking of feminism, and off topic, the Sexpol Communist club was discussing Inland Empire at Adamina´s site when Comrade Infinite Thought started theorizing on all the beautiful young whores appearing in the film:
nough of confused-looking women not being able to open a door properly. I mean, YAWN.
Lost Highway is great, but the faux-avant-garde haze of Inland Empire is just, hmm, immanently uninteresting. MD is okay, kinda, tho the Silentio scene is a perfume ad and the gay stuff is just a build-up/let-down for the guy who is never happy with his coffee. The reference to the Playstation is also a bit meh.
infinite thought | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 6:57 pm | #
Laura Dern did spend approximately 70% of the movie looking confused.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 7:00 pm | #
Right. As if lost, wild-eyed women were the key to modernity, or something. Heh.
infinite thought | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 7:05 pm | #
But then there’s the 10% of the time when she’s the hard-ass woman who gouges a guy’s eye out and then knees him in the balls so hard that (reportedly) they go up into his brain.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 7:11 pm | #
Sure. But isn’t the tough-as-f**k bit supposed to make you think that all women are just acting, or something. Cos, like, she’s both real class and maybe a hooker at the same time. I dunno. I liked the structural critique of the Myspace spectacle tho.
infinite thought | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 7:29 pm | #
Is that how you read the parts with the mobs of girls?
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 12.03.07 – 8:03 pm | #
all women are just acting, or something
The alternative hypothesis is frankly too horrible to consider.
Dominic | Homepage | 12.04.07 – 1:35 am | #
Adam – yes, struck me that the girl gangs with their overt self-promotion and excessive sexual auto-commodification were supposed to be something like that.
Dominic – true.
infinite thought | Homepage | 12.04.07 – 3:03 am | #
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I think what Comrade Thought is suggesting here is that beautiful young women with firm, ample tits who wear makeup are not only the vehicle of capitalist sexploitation, but also, that they have INTERNALIZED their function as such and are now involved in something called ´´selfcommodifying spectacle´´. She is talking about the scene in the film where this young hooker displays her truly engaging breasts to the appreciation of the other hookers (and no doubt Lynch himself).
What Comrade Thought may be inferring is that women should hack off their breasts, because in the overcommodified MySpace of capitalism already having tits is an act of complicity with exploitation.
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but I´d appreciate it if you didn´t chastise me on virtualities then, you Thatcherite MORALIST.
I don’t care what you appreciate, you crude total-bottom. I’m treating you like shit because you’ve asked for it, and the main thing is that I won’t write for your fucking blog, you virtual insect.
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I’m treating you like shit because you’ve asked for it, and the main thing is that I won’t write for your fucking blog, you virtual insect.
OK but quit your shit right now because we need to win this war. We started it together and we have to finish it. After that, you don´t have to write for my blog.
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“Yes, Zizek’s a scumbag, but his acolytes are much worse, just a shower of petit bourgeois peons with aristocratic airs. This i hope to make clear in my next post.”
That’s kenoma, announcing her comeback. a little riff on ‘being-non-arpege’, she also said she was ‘neither one of these things’ (‘nigger-woman’), and, of course, thought it very important to point this out. She thought she had done this slyly, just as her refutation of my knowledge that she is MOLLY KLEIN has not changed one whit, they were just celebrating CHILDIE-KLEIN VU’s operation. Warszawa’s only admirable quality among virtual insects was that she really didn’t care what you thought she was. Here you see Kenoma protesting that she is not a ‘nigger-woman’, precisely what I KNEW she would do; the remark had been merely to provoke, and it worked perfectly. This also proves that Kenoma things that ‘nigger-woman’ is a such thing, as opposed to the usual vulgar Marxist denial or ‘race’, as they always put it in quotes. She not only is decidedly NOT a ‘nigger-woman’, she DOES KNOW that the entity ‘nigger-woman’ has credence and agency…This was a statement of secret racism. I know that it is MOLLY KLEIN, because she once wrote ‘my husband is neither American nor Jewish’, and it had the same ring to it.
All right, you can decide the war has been won on your own. I already told you I’d won it, the problem is you think you lost it because you keep sucking Childie Klein-Vu’s pussy.
So I give the orders now, motherfucker, because I’m the top and I’m also the one who hasn’t been fucking up like crazy. Your comment at Jodi’s was a step in the right direction, but if I find you commenting at either of the Childie Klein-Vu’s or at Kenoma, I will declare myself the winner of the War, and will hand you over as spoils to the losers because you have been a means to the Paramecianism.
I mean it, fuckstick.At this point, YOU DO AS I SAY about where you comment. I don’t want people who suck maggot juice any more than Edward G. Robinson wanted ‘guys who are soft.’ And you have proved that you will suck the pussies of your enemies on a daily basis, each time of which they made capital gains and heavy profits for the ARPEGE KLEINS!
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So here’s kretinoma at MOLLY KLEIN’S.
“Hu hu. Beavis is back, but without Butthead I see (fun fact: a jonquille is a kind of daffodil whose root has emetic properties). For the record, I gave the sweatshop apologist’s post the attention it deserved. It was a pile of shit, like everything else she writes (if you don’t read i cite, the repertoire is apologetics for hiring maids and other such burning social issues). She states that people aren’t dehumanized when they are tortured or murdered. She is a cretin.’
And this cunt had asked for ‘an apology’ for Arpege Klein’s ass from Jodi. She is referring to YOU as Beavis, ridiculing for going back there, just as I TOLD YOUR THICK SKULL. From now on, you look at me like R. Lee Erney in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and when I tell you to polish your shoes and fold your uniform properly, you had better fucking do it! And when I yell at you ‘DO YOU SUCK DICKS?’ the answer better be ‘No, SIRRRRR!’ I am not interested in what the truth of that answer is! You had better not brag on how you suck Surinam dick!
In other news, Childie Klein-Vu’s new blog format looks like some Horror House at a goddam Grammar School Halloween Carnival.
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Yes Sirrr, from this point onwards I am not commenting at the cesspits. The last one was too much of a temptation, as it showed Lt. Molly Klein, headquarters Rue Turbigo 55, engaging in stimulating erotic games with Moozlim cultural product. I just had to express my admiration of all the juicy feminist S / M.
I am now going to write up a quick review of Molly´s last post, and the comment boxes will serve as mobile headquarters.
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When are you two heading back to the Parody Center? It’s been languishing for some time now.
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We can operate out of quonset huts at both locations. Clysmatics is a thoroughly genius sort of person, and will be awarded a Purple Heart.
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“So, these are the kind of people she’s happy to be associated with. Still interested in her pontifications on what is and isn’t dehumanization?”
That’s the evil non-nigger-woman AFTER you wrote that comment. Am I to assume that you FEEL FREE to COMMENT on these FILTH-BLOGS any more, Miss Dejan! You answer me, I will not return to Parody Centrum if you DARE to write ONE MORE WORD, because I will know it. The very idea Jodi ‘approves’ of torture. There are many non-Communists who disapprove of torture, although I do hope Kretinoma and MOLLY KLEIN and ARPEGE VU appreciate that we are going to fucking WATERBOARD their pussies unless, you, FOUL DICK-SUCKING BOTTOM, dares to go over there again! You have to prove that you can go FOUR FULL DAYS without commenting on the TOILET BLOGS for me to make even one single comment at your own quonset huts, because, believe you me, Clysmatics has the better-operating blog than you do, you DICKSUCKING PIG!
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I won´t comment. I have to go to work now but in the weekend I will prepare combat material. Clysmatics I´m sorry we overstayed our welcome, but you have to understand how it is in times of war and be prepared to nurse the soldiers from time to time.
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Dejan and Patrick, it’s come to my attention that people reading my blog have been taking your obscene and insulting language seriously and are offended by it. I assume that you’re not serious, but I can never be sure and neither can other people. So please either chat amicably among yourselves without berating each other, or talk about the topic of the post, or go back to Parody Center. Thanks for your consideration.
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Clysmatics I am fully aware that Jonquille, being possessed by Beelzebub, has been fornicating all over the place, which might have insulted your readership’s sensibilities. But you have to understand we are at war with an utterly cruel and unforgiving race – SATAN’S MINIONS FROM MARXIST HELL. Such a Force cannot be defeated by polite language.
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Parody Center, if you’ll forgive my saying so, it seems that your own little civil war has been more linguistically destructive than have your efforts on your Eastern Front. Best of luck to the both of you
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Samlcarr you have these moments between queer partners, but they go away quickly and so we’ll be regrouping shortly to deliver a deadly blow to the Axis of Sherbertian Evil.
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My contention, Parodycenter, is that your war is a parodic gesture, a theatrical performance intended in part to identify covert and unconscious hostilities that permeate the blogosphere and to make them overt to the point of the ridiculous. I’m not saying you like all these people and agree with them politically, intellectually, etc. You might not even like each other. I’m saying that I don’t believe you really hate them or mean all the foul things you say to and about them. Further, I believe that when you refer to your victims in racist or misogynistic or fascistic terms, you are choosing terms that will most offend the sensibilities of your victims, and that you do not subscribe to or endorse racist or misogynistic attitudes.
You can say publicly that it’s all a joke and not mean it; you can say publicly that it’s serious and not mean it. The difficulty is that even I, who have been both a target of Parody Center and a member of the audience, who regard both of you as online friends — even I can never know for sure that it’s all an act. More problematic, casual observers might not even suspect that they’re witnessing a farce rather than the rantings of real racists and sexists and fascists. And there will be casual observers, especially if your “war” really is a performance intended to draw an audience.
I hadn’t really thought about this problem seriously. But when, e.g., you start calling people “fat Haitian wimmin” there will surely be members of the audience who believe that you hate fat people and Haitians and women. If they believe you believe it and still they come back for more entertainment, then you’ve got an audience that consists in part of real racists and misogynists. And by my not condemning this sort of attitude and language, I’m perceived as a real racist and misogynist too. I don’t want to offend people who aren’t in on what I think is the joke, nor do I want to provide a haven for people who really are fascists. You’ve made yourselves far more vulnerable to this perception that I. You might not care, but I do.
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I hadn’t really thought about this problem seriously. But when, e.g., you start calling people “fat Haitian wimmin” there will surely be members of the audience who believe that you hate fat people and Haitians and women.
Indeed but those types of people can FREELY SUCK MY COCK – that’s the bottom line, and I think Jonquille agrees. I don’t answer to them for being or not being a racist. Besides if they’re stupid to believe that a person with a meta meta meta meta brain like my own could be so crass as to underappreciate juicy Haitian pussy and love handles, then they SHOULDN’T BE READING YOUR BLAWG DAD!2
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There are metabrains who really do advocate racial purity and genocide and quarantining AIDS victims and so on. And a metametametabrain could easily install a hall of mirrors between himself and his audience, such that overt fascistic remarks are portrayed as parody of fascism whereas in fact underneath the parody is real fascism. There may be actual fat Haitian women who read blogs who have had encounters with real racists and with people who claim not to be but who remain on friendly terms with the racists and do nothing to stop them. You understand my point.
You’ve chided me for being too much of a cognitivist, for emphasizing the conscious expression of intent without giving the unconscious affective register its due. We’ve also discussed whether the unrestrained spontaneous expression of the unconscious is “good art” e.g. in the context of a film like Inland Empire. I hear that argument. But by now a significant part of Parodycenter’s expression has been repeated over and over, categorized in language, stereotyped, spoken with conscious intent, a form of instrumental rationality. I think maybe it’s time you moved on to other expressions of your creative gifts. I think it’s also time that I move on. I’ve seen the show and the reruns and it’s gotten old.
As you know, I write posts and comments as straightforwardly as I can, usually without much affect. This too is an act of conscious craft. Some have said that I too am putting on an act, intended to disguise my own corrupt attitudes, so obviously there’s no guarantee that you can control the reader’s perceptions of you. Up till now I’ve ignored all the other shitslinging that’s gone on here, flung by both sides in the “war.” But from now on I’m going to uphold a blog environment that reflects my own way of going about things: critique, discussion, chatting, but no personal insults. I think there’s something lost in restricting the field of play, but at this point I think there’s more to be gained by restoring a sense of civility and mutual respect, even for people I like (insert winky smiley face here).
So, to one and all: PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST FROM ENGAGING IN PERSONAL INSULTS ON KTISMATICS. I won’t ban people who violate the house rules, but I will delete the violating comments.
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You understand my point.
No I don’t. Are you scared of becoming the target of NeoNazis, or the National Anti-Terrorist Association?
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My point is that I’m opposed on ethical grounds to racial, sexual, and other forms of bigotry. Some people will regard expressions of such bigotry on this blog, and probably on Parody Center as well, as the true and consciously hurtful expressions of the writer’s beliefs. In an open forum like a blog it’s not possible to establish warrants of goodwill among strangers that require them to distinguish sincere from sarcastic expressions of bigotry. So I’m prepared to uphold a standard of transparency of language, of language as an expression of conscious belief. And I’m not going to limit this standard to bigotry — any form of personal insult that I regard as potentially hurtful I’ll consider to be a serious expression of disrespect for the other person. One could say that the blogs aren’t a serious and sincere place anyway, that people perpetually hide behind false identities and carefully crafted self-presentations That’s fine: there are plenty of false selves that don’t rely on an aggressively insulting style of interaction. People who come here can pick any one of those alternative selves without feeling overly constrained.
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I think maybe it’s time you moved on to other expressions of your creative gifts. I think it’s also time that I move on. I’ve seen the show and the reruns and it’s gotten old.
Hey, fuck you, Clysmatics, and I hope you bought my book only because I like to waste your money. You cowardly CUNT!
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“Further, I believe that when you refer to your victims in racist or misogynistic or fascistic terms, you are choosing terms that will most offend the sensibilities of your victims, and that you do not subscribe to or endorse racist or misogynistic attitudes.:”
Who cares if you believe this, which is why we do fight [named blogger] & CIE. the way we do–and in blog terms, it IS a real way, not a farce–when you prove yourself to be so pusillanimous a fool as you then proceed to prove.
Dejan, if you don’t delete selected remarks from Clysmatics just like he plans to delete us, then I will leave you for more than just a vacation. You have to quit rewarding people who punish genius, and have full totalitarian self-respect for your own dick just like I do mine. I can’t help it that Clysmatics is ineffectual and suffering from mid-life crisis, and I couldn’t give a fuck if he deletes me or you. We always know that the [expletive deleted] [named bloggers] will leave our comments in. What did you expect from some Robert Young type anyway. In any case, I’m about to copy and paste these for the quonset huts, since Clysmatics is a homophobic ordinary lame piece of shit.
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My point is that I’m opposed on ethical grounds to racial, sexual, and other forms of bigotry.
You didn’t even care one way or another until the [unnamed other bloggers] started writing you. We’re all opposed to these things, but this is just blogging and we have already defeated [named other bloggers]. If Jodi decided to denounce us, it would still not defeat ME. She would defeat herself, just as you have proved you want to defeat yourself and go back and live in the same Orwellian double-speak as [named blogger] and [insult deleted] cohorts. Go to hell.
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“there are plenty of false selves that don’t rely on an aggressively insulting style of interaction.”
NOT when you are dealing with [blogger identity deleted by proprietor]. You should understand that by now, but there’s no point in this business explaining to people with thick heads.
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As I said a few comments back, it’s not possible to control the perceptions others have of me. And you’re now saying that you are serious “in blog terms,” not just about other people you’ve railed at but also about me. And again, there’s no way to know whether you’re “in costume” or not. The verbal abuses are no longer conducive to civil discourse because I either have to expend the mental energy to ignore them or to defend myself against them or to retaliate, none of which suits me. So I am now going to tidy up your last couple of comments, removing insults directed at others and leaving in the ones aimed at me. Henceforth I will also start protecting my own ass as well. You can, of course, post the uncensored versions elsewhere if you like.
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You can, of course, post the uncensored versions elsewhere if you like.
What noblesse oblige. Okay, Clysmatics, goodbye, you can go back to Sunday School, but this was hardly unpredictable. That’s why I was so good for you: I forced you to reveal your mediocrity and hypocrisy.
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I think you are good for me, Jonquille, and I generally have come to regard your harshly packaged observations as areas of possible weakness I ought to reconsider about myself. I’ve been accused of both mediocrity and hypocrisy from various fronts lately, so I’m taking it into consideration more intensively than I usually do. But I would completely ignore these criticisms if I didn’t feel some vulnerability to them.
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But I would completely ignore these criticisms if I didn’t feel some vulnerability to them.
So is that a disclaimer or what? Of course you’d ignore them if you didn’t think they might be true. What else is new?
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Nothing new — just an acknowledgment. Probably everyone is concerned about their own excellence and honor.
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Well, it probably has been finished by now, I think. I hope to Dejan’s satisfation. I’ve got copies of traxus’s and Molly’s talk of ‘every phrase, etc…makes me want to hurt someone’, which he says in regard to Jodi’s post and Arpege agrees. This Molly tries to circumvent, when she should have had sense enough to delete hers and traxus’s posts, by throwing me the New York Stalking Laws, which is completely absurd under the circumstances of what stalking has to involve. It’s time, though, that Ryan started realizing that he will not be treated like an adult until he acts like one, and he is far from doing that in any area except word-spinning. I suppose I continued this this morning so as to help Dejan to some degree; I’m not really that concerned with Molly myself. I only had to make it clear to dejan that he could not be so righteously furious at Molly if not also Ryan, because they’ve chosen to ally with each other. For me, it doesn’t matter that much, as Dejan knows. But when she starts the veiled legalisms, she might as well know that she’s a good bit more guilty than she’d hoped, and had not covered herself nearly as well as I have. That’s probably what upsets Dejan the most, that she does make veiled legal threats to him. And that’s also why I had to throw the same thing back at her, because it’s an extremely below-the-belt thing to make veiled legal threats as she’s been doing to Dejan, and, as of this morning, to me, and I have no intention of being intimidated by her evil–because legal threats, however veiled, and I have them all copied, are evil when they are based on a purely personal political agenda. She must think she is more fastidious than she is. But I really just wanted to finish this, and I do think that it’s complete enough, if Dejan can control his fury at Molly.
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I’m pretty sure Molly will leave it alone if Dejan will. There is indeed no reason for this to go into reruns, and I think everything has been exploited and all the cells exploded, so that we have all learned something, even if the process was harsh. I don’t quite understand, if you must know, why I don’t have any more sense of anger. The things occurred that caused my anger and everyone else’s, and you can’t imagine any reprieve from it, but then there it is. I can’t speak for Dejan, but something or other happened that I can’t quite put my finger on.
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At some point one needs to DECIDE that the book is finished, the show has completed its run, the war is over, etc. With a sense of closure you’re free (after a period of mourning and celebration) to move on, hopefully to ever more creative and worthwhile endeavors.
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At some point one needs to DECIDE that the book is finished,
Not quite, John, as I was just ruminating at Chabert’s. You CAN make it seem as if you’d decided, pronouncing it, but it decided itself, was not your decision alone. That’s the uncanny part of it, and why I don’t know if Dejan would have necessarily come to this subsiding. Since we didn’t kill each other, I don’t really regret it now. Read my last comment under the Toilet Paper post at Chabert’s, this is what I’m talking about and I remember first feeling it as having happened as a kind of emotional orgasm in my 2nd Tahiti trip, when I came back from Tahiti-iti, the smaller part of the hourglass-shaped island and returned to Papeete, the capital. Since then, I have felt this creative production more and more, and there is a sense that you find it all the more by putting only the most minimal effort into it–this is very much along the lines of the artist being the custodian of the art, allowing it to emerge. I don’t know if all art comes about this way, but all of the best things I do, including art, do happen that way. Jodi says academic writing is not like that, and is much more workmanlike, so though not fraught with so much danger, does not also hold as much promise of those ecstasies which are perhaps somehow perceived as childish (just like utopias) but are nevertheless longer for. And while I do not have any sympathy whatever, even now, after having made peace with Molly, with the things Ryan is saying, I had made my point well enough so that he cannot possibly misunderstand it. This is not quite as rapturous as I have made it sound: I’ve had beefs with Molly, very serious ones, but that was not central for me in this recent fierce situation. As such, I’ve made peace with Molly, plan to leave her alone while still having a whiff of old affection for her, still do like Jodi very much no matter what they’ve said to dismember her, and at this point do not like Ryan at all. He disappointed me totally. As much as I was the most active player in much of this, I am still not the only one who was mostly wrong, or even more wrong than anyone else. There was simply an opening in which a kind of peace could be made between Molly and me, and since Dejan is not particularly at odds with Ryan, I hope he will be able to let it calm down. As for Ryan, I plan to avoid him , being deeply unimpressed at his ‘product’.
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“You CAN make it seem as if you’d decided, pronouncing it, but it decided itself, was not your decision alone. That’s the uncanny part of it”
Yes, that’s better and more satisfying — being an active part of a complex creative outworking that’s unexpected, maybe thrilling and sorrowful and mysterious — which you capture beautifully in your final comment at Chabert’s post.
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Thank you, John. And it had to be seen through to its end–although I begin to get the feeling that it’s not over for Dejan as it is for me. The verbal violence on my part has largely to do with getting the circularity out of the blogging process so that I can get all the way out of it (one of the things bloggers tell you is that ‘you can just change channels; this isn’t so, it’s far worse than that, it is a labyrinth that requires enormous resourcefulness in dealing with if you cannot be, as I said, more blogger-identified than I am. In other words, I am always fighting it, and my violence was directed toward THIS more than any other single person; except that it was Ryan who made the ultimate decision for blogging-identity. Therefore, I had to fight tooth and nail, and this caused me to lose sight of my own work untl today and yesterday, when I finally got going with it again. And you may decide to keep a blog, but you should keep this in mind.) I frankly think Jodi’s piece that is freaking them out is brilliant, and is one of the most crucial pieces in this puzzle. In it, she achieves a perfect balance, and it is really that post more than anything else that allowed me to come to this quiet conclusion. But Ryan’s saying that it ‘made him want to hurt someone’ made it then necessary to leave it to the others if they choose, since he and I are diametrically opposed (however cordial Chabert and I were, I would not be so with Ryan). I hope Dejan will be able to as well. I’ve enjoyed the Parody Center, but I deleted the password when he sent it to me yesterday, and this shows you how the addiction to blogging can grow–not that I consider his any more severe than Molly’s, but I do know I can’t live with much of it, and I have already become associated with CPC that taking the Password would be an outrageous bondage I’d live with. that accounts for how self-indulgent I get in order to keep something going when I feel it necessary to finish off something that is not kindred to me by nature.
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I’m glad events configured themselves in a satisfying way, Patrick, and that Jodi’s post served as a catalyst for you. Dejan is probably overloaded with the new job and deciding what to do next creatively and so on.
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Friends, indeed I was busy on the job – I switched to a new tempo, as opposed to my free unemployed existence, and as it turns out I didn´t sleep enough. I shall consider the war finished with an unsatisfying truce, but the parody will NEVER cease and desist, especially not parody of the Axis of Marxian Evil, led by Molly Klein and her vicious acolytes. It is our duty to civilization, culture and mankind to expose their lies. This weekend I am seeing Eastern Promises, and a new piece by Clive Barker, all of which finally came to Holland, so there will be new subjects to discuss.
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I hope you have a free weekend in which to get rested up. I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts on Eastern Promises, Dejan. I saw No Country for Old Men a couple weeks ago. The bad guy, Chigurh, is presented, and presents himself, as an impersonal agent of violence, moved by fate and chance. Toward the end of the movie the Coens made a small but important change from McCarthy’s book. Chigurh is about to kill someone because he struck a bargain with her husband and in fulfilling that deal he must kill her — even though her husband is already dead. She says that Chigurh can decide not to kill her; he disagrees. Finally he says he’ll flip her for it: he takes a coin out of his pocket and asks her to call it. She cannot grasp the inhumanity of her murderer. In the book she finally calls heads, the coin flip turns up tails, and Chigurh kills her. In the movie she refuses to call it, and Chigurh kills her. This cinematic move places Chigurh back in the position of human subject, consciously responsible for his actions. Which is better: McCarthy’s version or the Coen’s version?
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“Object a As Inherent Limit to Capitalism:
On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”
What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading (clearly the definitive exercises in Deleuzian politics) is that we are dealing with books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection of — one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in — an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas. So their theoretical limitation is simultaneously the limitation of the actual movement.
Hardt’s and Negri’s basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their philosophical paradigm, Deleuze!), is to identify (to name) “democracy” as the common denominator of all today’s emancipatory movements: “The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the world today — at local, regional, and global levels — is the desire for democracy.”1 Far from standing for a utopian dream, democracy is “the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, /…/ the only way out of our state of perpetual conflict and war.”2 Not only is democracy inscribed into the present antagonisms as an immanent telos of their resolution; even more, today, the rise of the multitude in the heart of capitalism “makes democracy possible for the first time”3 Till now, democracy was constrained by the form of the One, of the sovereign state power; “absolute democracy” (“the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts,”4 only becomes possible when “the multitude is finally able to rule itself.”5
For Marx, highly organized corporate capitalism already was “socialism within capitalism” (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the absent owners becoming more and more superfluous), so that one only needs to cut the nominal head off and we get socialism. For Negri and Hardt, however, the limitation of Marx was that he was historically constrained to the centralized and hierarchically organized machinical automatized industrial labor, which is why their vision of “general intellect” was that of a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of the “immaterial labor” to the hegemonic role, that the revolutionary reversal becomes “objectively possible.” This immaterial labor extends between the two poles of intellectual (symbolic) labor (production of ideas, codes, texts, programs, figures: writers, programmers…) and affective labor (those who deal with our bodily affects: from doctors to baby-sitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labor is “hegemonic” in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th century capitalism, large industrial production is hegemonic as the specific color giving its tone to the totality — not quantitatively, but playing the key, emblematic structural role: “What the multitude produces is not just goods or services; the multitude also and most importantly produces cooperation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships.”6 What thereby emerges is a new vast domain the “common”: shared knowledge, forms of cooperation and communication, etc., which can no longer be contained by the form of private property. This, then, far from posing a mortal threat to democracy (as conservative cultural critics want us to believe), opens up a unique chance of “absolute democracy”. Why? In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves — in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production of social life. It was already Marx who emphasized how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relations within which it occurs; with today’s capitalism, however, the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production: “Such new forms of labor /…/ present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself.”7 The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and as to its content?); the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics) IS the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes political production, the production of society itself. The way is thus open for “absolute democracy,” for the producers directly regulating their social relations without even the detour of democratic representation.
There is a whole series of concrete questions that this vision gives rise to. Can one really interpret this move towards the hegemonic role of immaterial labor as the move from production to communication, to social interaction (in Aristotelian terms, from techne as poiesis to praxis: as the overcoming of the Arendtian distinction between production and vis activa, or of the Habermasian distinction between instrumental and communicational reason)? How does this “politicization” of production, where production directly produces (new) social relations, affect the very notion of politics? Is such an “administration of people” (subordinated to the logic of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of depoliticization, the entry into “post-politics?” And, last but not least, is democracy by necessity, with regard to its very notion, non-absolute? There is no democracy without a hidden, presupposed elitism. Democracy is, by definition, not “global”; it HAS to be based on values and/or truths which one cannot select “democratically.” In democracy, one can fight for truth, but not decide what IS truth. As Claude Lefort and others amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately re-presenting (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. In other words, the democratic articulation of an interest is always minimally performative: through their democratic representatives, people establish what their interests and opinions are. As Hegel already knew, “absolute democracy” could only actualize itself in the guise of its “oppositional determination,” as terror. There is, thus, a choice to be made here: do we accept democracy’s structural, not just accidental, imperfection, or do we also endorse its terrorist dimension? However, much more pertinent is another critical point which concerns Negri and Hardt’s neglect of the FORM in the strict dialectical sense of the term.
Negri and Hardt continuously oscillate between their fascination by the global capitalism’s “deterritorializing” power, and the rhetoric of the struggle of the multitude against the One of the capitalist power. The financial capital with its wild speculations detached from the reality of material labor, this standard bete noire of the traditional Left, is celebrated as the germ of the future, capitalism’s most dynamic and nomadic aspect. The organizational forms of today’s capitalism — decentralization of the decision-making, radical mobility and flexibility, interaction of multiple agents — are perceived as pointing towards the oncoming reign of the multitude. It is as if everything is already here, in the “postmodern” capitalism, or, in Hegelese, the passage from In-itself to For-itself — all that is needed is just an act of purely formal conversion, like the one developed by Hegel apropos the struggle between Enlightenment and Faith, where he describes how the “silent, ceaseless weaving of the Spirit”
infiltrates the noble parts through and through and soon has taken complete possession of all the vitals and members of the unconscious idol; then ‘one fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow, and bang! crash! the idol lies on the floor.’ On ‘one fine morning’ whose noon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiritual life.8
Even the fashionable parallel with the new cognitivist notion of human psyche is not missing here: in the same way brain sciences teach us how there is no central Self in the brain, how our decisions emerge out of the interaction of a pandemonium of local agents, how our psychic life is an “autopoietic” process which, without any imposed centralizing agency (a model which, incidentally, is explicitly based on the parallel with today’s “decentralized” capitalism). So the new society of the multitude which rules itself will be like today’s cognitivist notion of the ego as a pandemonium of interacting agents with no central deciding Self running the show… However, although Negri and Hardt see today’s capitalism as the main site of the proliferating multitudes, they continue to rely on the rhetorics of the One, the sovereign Power, against the multitude; how they bring these two aspects together is clear: while capitalism generates multitudes, it contains them in the capitalist form, thereby unleashing a demon it is unable to control. The question to be asked here is nonetheless if Hardt and Negri do not commit a mistake homologous to that of Marx: is their notion of the pure multitude ruling itself not the ultimate capitalist fantasy, the fantasy of capitalism self-revolutionizing perpetual movement freely exploding when freed of its inherent obstacle? In other words, is the capitalist FORM (the form of the appropriation of surplus-value) not the necessary form, formal frame/condition, of the self-propelling productive movement?
Consequently, when Negri and Hardt repeatedly emphasize how “this is a philosophical book,” and warn the reader “do not expect our book to answer the question, What is to be done? or propose a concrete program of action,”9 this constraint is not as neutral as it may appear: it points towards a fundamental theoretical flaw. After describing multiple forms of resistance to the Empire, Multitude ends with a messianic note pointing towards the great Rupture, the moment of Decision when the movement of multitudes will be transubstantiated the sudden birth of a new world: “After this long season of violence and contradictions, global civil war, corruption of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the biopolitical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectional demand.”10 However, at this point when one expects a minimum theoretical determination of this rupture, what we get is again withdrawal into philosophy: “A philosophical book like this, however, is not the place for us to evaluate whether the time for revolutionary political decision is imminent.”11 Negri and Hardt perform here an all-too-quick jump: of course one cannot ask them to provide a detailed empirical description of the Decision, of the passage to the globalized “absolute democracy,” to the multitude that rules itself; however, what if this a justified refusal to engage in pseudo-concrete futuristic predictions masks an inherent notional deadlock/impossibility? That is to say, what one does and should expect is a description of the notional structure of this qualitative jump, of the passage from the multitudes RESISTING the One of sovereign Power to the multitudes directly RULING themselves. Leaving the notional structure of this passage in a darkness elucidated only by vague homologies and examples from the movements of resistance cannot but raise the anxious suspicion that this self-transparent direct rule of everyone over everyone, this democracy tout court, will coincide with its opposite.12
Negri and Hardt are right in rendering problematic the standard Leftist revolutionary notion of “taking power”: such a strategy accepts the formal frame of the power structure and aims merely at replacing one bearer of power (“them”) with another (“us”). As it was fully clear to Lenin in his State and Revolution, the true revolutionary aim is not to “take power,” but to undermine, disintegrate, the very apparatuses of state power. Therein resides the ambiguity of the “postmodern” Leftist calls to abandon the program of “taking power”: do they imply that one should ignore the existing power structure, or, rather, limit oneself to resisting it by way of constructing alternative spaces outside the state power network (the Zapatista strategy in Mexico); or do they imply that one should disintegrate, pull the ground of, the state power, so that the state power will simply collapse, implode? In the second case, the poetic formulas about the multitude immediately ruling itself do not suffice.
Hardt and Negri conform here a sort of triad whose other two terms are Ernesto Laclau and Giorgio Agamben. The ultimate difference between Laclau and Agamben concerns the structural inconsistency of power: while they both insist on this inconsistency, their position towards it is exactly opposite. Agamben’s focusing on the vicious circle of the link between legal power (the rule of Law) and violence is sustained by the messianic utopian hope that it is possible to radically break this circle and step out of it (in an act of the Benjaminian “divine violence”). In The Coming Community, he refers to Saint Thomas’s answer to the difficult theological question: What happens to the souls of unbaptized babies who have died in ignorance of both sin and God? They committed no sin, so their punishment
cannot be an afflictive punishment, like that of hell, but only a punishment of privation that consists in the perpetual lack of the vision of God. The inhabitants of limbo, in contrast to the damned, do not feel pain from this lack: /…/ they do not know that they are deprived of the supreme good. /…/ The greatest punishment — the lack of the vision of God — thus turns into a natural joy: irremediably lost, they persist without pain in divine abandon.13
Their fate is for Agamben the model of redemption: they “have left the world of guilt and justice behind them: the light that rains down on them is that irreparable light of the dawn following the novissima dies of judgment. But the life that begins on earth after the last day is simply human life.”14 (One cannot but recall here the crowd of humans who remain on stage at the end of Wagner’s “Twilight of Gods,” silently witnessing the self-destruction of gods — what if they are the happy ones?) And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for Negri and Hardt who perceive resistance to power as preparing the ground for a miraculous LEAP into “absolute democracy” in which multitude will directly rule itself — at this point, the tension will be resolved, freedom will explodes into eternal self-proliferation. The difference between Agamben and Negri and Hardt could be best apprehended by means of the good old Hegelian distinction between abstract and determinate negation: although Negri and Hardt are even more anti-Hegelian than Agamben, their revolutionary LEAP remains an act of “determinate negation,” the gesture of formal reversal, of merely setting free the potentials developed in global capitalism which already is a kind of “Communism-in-itself”; in contrast to them, Agamben — and, again, paradoxically, in spite of his animosity to Adorno — outlines the contours of something which is much closer to the utopian longing for the ganz Andere (wholly Other) in late Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, to a redemptive leap into a non-mediated Otherness.
Laclau and Mouffe, on the contrary, propose a new version of the old Edouard Bernstein’s arch-revisionist motto “goal is nothing, movement is all”: the true danger, the temptation to be resisted, is the very notion of a radical cut by means of which the basic social antagonism will be dissolved and the new era of a self-transparent non-alienated society will arrive. For Laclau and Mouffe, such a notion disavows not only the Political as such, the space of antagonisms and struggle for hegemony, but the fundamental ontological finitude of the human condition as such — which is why, any attempt to actualize such a leap has to end up in a totalitarian disaster. What this means is that the only way to elaborate and practice livable particular political solutions is to admit the global a priori deadlock: we can only solve particular problems against the background of the irreducible global deadlock. Of course, this is no way entails that political agents should limit themselves to solving particular problems, abandoning the topic of universality: for Laclau and Mouffe, universality is impossible and at the same time necessary, i.e., there is no direct “true” universality, every universality is always-already caught into the hegemonic struggle, it is an empty form hegemonized (filled in) by some particular content which, at a given moment and in a given conjuncture, functions as its stand-in.
Are, however, these two approaches really as radically opposed as it may appear? Does Laclau and Mouffe’s edifice not also imply its own utopian point: the point at which political battles would be fought without remainders of “essentialism,” all sides fully accepting the radically contingent character of their endeavors and the irreductible character of social antagonisms. On the other hand, Agamben’s position is also not without its secret advantages: since, with today’s biopolitics, the space of political struggle is closed and any democratic-emancipatory movements are meaningless, we cannot do anything but comfortably wait for the miraculous explosion of the “divine violence.” As for Negri and Hardt, they bring us back to the Marxist confidence that “history is on our side,” that historical development is already generating the form of the Communist future.
If anything, the problem with Negri and Hardt is that they are TOO MUCH Marxists, taking over the underlying Marxist scheme of historical progress: like Marx, they celebrate the “deterritorializing” revolutionary potential of capitalism; like Marx, they locate the contradiction within capitalism, in the gap between this potential and the form of the capital, of the private-property appropriation of the surplus. In short, they rehabilitate the old Marxist notion of the tension between productive forces and the relations of production: capitalism already generates the “germs of the future new form of life,” it incessantly produces the new “common,” so that, in a revolutionary explosion, this New should just be liberated from the old social form. However, precisely as Marxists, on behalf of our fidelity to Marx’s work, we should discern the mistake of Marx: he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breath-taking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity — see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, “all things solid melt into thin air,” of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism — the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is the Capital itself, i.e. the capitalist incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction… Marx’s fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, 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 capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (“contradiction”), is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, 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 capitalism, 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 this obstacle dissipates… (Therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance). So the critics of Communism were in a way right when they claimed that the Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy — what they did not perceive is that the Marxiam 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.
So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to the surplus-value? One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and the surplus-enjoyment as its cause. Recall the curl of the blond hair, this fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” When, in the love scene in the barn towards the end of the film, Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long enough to steal a look at her newly blond hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which makes her into the object of desire is still there… So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. And, back to Marx: what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (the unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when deprived of the cause that propels it (the surplus-value)? The same holds even more for Deleuze, since he develops his theory of desire in direct opposition to the Lacanian one. Deleuze asserts the priority of desire over its objects: desire is a positive productive force which exceeds its objects, a living flow proliferating through the multitude of objects, penetrating them and passing through them, in no need of any fundamental lack or “castration” that would serve as its foundation. For Lacan, however, desire has to be sustained by an object-cause: not some primordial incestuous Lost Object on which desire remains forever transfixed and whose unsatisfying substitutes all other objects are, but a purely formal object which causes us to desire objects that we encounter in reality. This object-cause of desire is thus not transcendent, the inaccessible excess forever eluding our grasp, but behind the subject’s back, something that from within directs desiring. And, as is the case with Marx, it is Deleuze’s failure to take into account this object-cause that sustains the illusory vision of unconstrained productivity of desire — or, in the case of Hardt and Negri, the illusory vision of multitude ruling itself, no longer constrained by any totalizing One. We can observe here the catastrophic political consequences of the failure to develop what may appear a purely academic, “philosophical,” notional distinction.
Notes
1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004
2. ibid
3. ibid
4. ibid
5. ibid
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, Oxford; OUP, 1977.
9. Hardt M. and Negri A., op. cit.
10. ibid
11. ibid
12. This is also why Negri and Hardt’s reference to Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as the model for the protest movement of the multitude — they are carnevalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, chants, humorous songs), but also in their non-centralized organization — is deeply problematic: is late capitalist social reality itself not already carnevalesque? Furthermore, is “carnival” not also the name for the obscene underside of power — from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.
13. G. Agamben, The Coming Community, Minneapolis: MUP, 1993.
14. ibid
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Thank you, Doctor. I may have some observations and questions after I read your piece; if so I’ll write them and you are of course welcome to respond.
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There’s a lot of verbiage being flung around this review by Zizek, but it sounds like the nut is this: For H&N, and also for Marx says Zizek, capitalism could be the engine that runs Marxism if the top could be cut off; i.e., if the capitalists who take the surplus could be removed. Then the free-flowing work of the multitude would become a perpetuum mobile owned and controlled by the workers themselves. However, Zizek suggests that the surplus, the value that’s removed from the commodity, is precisely what stimulates the desire to earn and to buy. It’s the always-missing object of desire that fuels the whole productive engine. By implication, if you get rid of the surplus, either by lowering prices or by redistributing it from the capitalists to the workers, then the whole engine stalls, the Multitude stagnates, and the Marxist fantasy self-destructs. So, says Z, the Multitude NEEDS the capitalists to withhold the surplus and to keep it away from the workers/consumers in order for the Multitude to achieve its potential. He also seems to suggest that the system NEEDS the capitalists themselves as the One, the executive decision-making function, in order to maintain the orderly operation of the production system as a whole. I.e., only via capitalism as currently structured can the free flow of worker productivity be sustained. Does that sound like the gist of his argument against H&N? I.e., H&N and Deleuze are TOO Marxist; that if they were more Lacanian they’d recognize that the Empire works because it is dominated by a capitalist class.
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I think it’s true that lack fuels marketplace desire at the microeconomic level. The fetish value of a commodity, the intangible value that exceeds its production cost and its use to the buyer, the source of profit, that infusion of personal plenitude that the product seems to promise but never delivers, that which keeps the consumer continually unsatisfied and continually buying more — this is the pathology fueling the excess of capitalism. What Zizek is asserting is that without this pathology of lack that drives consumption, producers would no longer be energized by their desire to be the cause of the consumer’s desire. As a result the vitality of production that surges through the multitude would dry up. By chopping off the Head that’s outside the system, the Big Other that has what everyone else lacks and to whom all the profits flow, the system itself would cease to operate.
I wonder if, at the individual level, Zizek would encourage people NOT to go into analysis. That obsessive drive that gets you nowhere and that’s driving you crazy: what would you do without it? Without the oscillating bipolar pathological motivation to obtain and to become le petit objet a, the object of desire, you’d never have motivation to do anything any more. Better to hang onto that sense of lack, better to have someone occupying the place of the Big Other to stimulate your sense of inadequacy and your perpetually futile efforts to overcome it. Without the imagined possibility of some day accomplishing the Revolution that overthrows the Big Other, when at last you usurp His position at the top — a Revolution that must remain forever deferred as some sort of unattainable utopian dream — you’d lose the envy and resentment that drive your ambition. Don’t go there, says Zizek: nurture that sense of lack, keep the fire burning, keep producing and consuming the useless intangible excess, make sure the Big Other remains forever just beyond your reach.
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“However, Zizek suggests that the surplus, the value that’s removed from the commodity, is precisely what stimulates the desire to earn and to buy. It’s the always-missing object of desire that fuels the whole productive engine. By implication, if you get rid of the surplus, either by lowering prices or by redistributing it from the capitalists to the workers, then the whole engine stalls, the Multitude stagnates, and the Marxist fantasy self-destructs. So, says Z, the Multitude NEEDS the capitalists to withhold the surplus and to keep it away from the workers/consumers in order for the Multitude to achieve its potential. He also seems to suggest that the system NEEDS the capitalists themselves as the One, the executive decision-making function, in order to maintain the orderly operation of the production system as a whole. I.e., only via capitalism as currently structured can the free flow of worker productivity be sustained.”
Zizek is, of course, right, and nobody wants to admit this. You’ve capsulized it quite well here, and it has all the beauty and rapture of life that many others have described quite well, not just Zizek and you. I’m fed up with anti-Zizekians if what he basicaly says is that we need to keep feeling that lack, keep those fucking fires burning, and if your name is Zizek, things could DEFINITELY be a lot better. I met two people in the last 4 days who were MUCH better culturalproduct than Zizek, so this little paean is just a consolation prize for Dr. Zizek, given that all his attackers are so much less gifted than he is, even though the other 4 people (yes, one of these was even a woman, so beautiful I’d throw Zizek out of bed in two seconds for her, even though she was not the sharpest dame on the block; but there is some nostalgic charm when someone actually still tries to get you to ‘work out your karma’ by coming to the Buddhist Chant Place, and you get to cut them off, and change the subject to higher things (I don’t mean theory, dears), and she’s that glamorous, that you even tell her so, and as far as I’m concerned, a woman that beautiful deserved that as a Christmas present FAR more than me listening to a lot of bullshit about Renge Kyo, or however the car-chants go.
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“It’s the always-missing object of desire that fuels the whole productive engine.”
But it’s also crucial that it is NOT ‘always-missing’, that’s the Marxist masochism. You fill ‘er up and are sated for awhile, this is healthy not to keep running yourself ragged…then you long for more, and you go on out and get it, and don’t fool with guilt-givers on this matter. They’re not interested in ‘a better world’ anyway, they just are losers in this one, and therefore want everybody else to be The Least Likely to Succeed. Either that, or they have strange tastes like doing nothing but reading all day. Ultimately, that’s why I like so few of these bloggers–about 1% of them are athletic. I see NO excuse for people to be physically lazy and sit on their asses all the time.
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Merry Christmas, Jonquille. I tried to order your book through Barnes & Noble (I had a coupon) but they couldn’t oblige, so I’ll have to proceed through the European supplier. This whole discussion of Hardt & Negri encourages me to keep my own counsel on political-economic matters, inasmuch as I learned nothing in particular from anybody. I was particularly disappointed with the Marxists, or at least those who seemingly know the Marxist position better than I. They seemed intent mostly on berating me for not knowing what they know — which I already admitted to be the case — or accusing me of some sort of secret malevolent agenda. Anyhow, I’m glad I stuck with the blog long enough for this thread to take shape in all its melodramatic fury.
I’m ready to channel some of this ever-replenishing Deleuzian creative energy actually to create something again. The blog for me is better if I regard it as a finished project rather than a chronic way of being. It pleased me for a time, and also some who came and read and conversed, but now is the time to make something else. If what I’m able to create actually satisfies somebody I’ll be pleased. There are those who produce cultural product with the intention of tantalizing the ever-hungry but never-satisfied, and there are others who through sheer luck happen to have the kind of talent and vision that draws a crowd. But there are other talents and other tastes, not necessarily ultra-elite but not excluding it, which might never come into being if the desiring-engines are the only mouths that stay open wide enough to get fed. There may be others, less craven, less gluttonous, who can savor a thing and be pleased with its unique excellence.
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In light of his commentary of Hardt & Negri, it seems odd that Zizek would have been regarded as a neo-Marxist rather than a neoconservative. Here he seems willfully to distort what Marx had to say about capitalism. But he does this immediately after proposing that H&N are also distorting Marxism by nearly equating it with democracy. Zizek parenthetically remarks that H&N’s sense of democratic insurgeny is “totally foreign to their philosophical paradigm, Deleuze!” — thereby in effect undermining the interpretive framework by which the reader is liable to interpret H&N. It seems that Zizek wants to put H&N on his side of the neo-Marxist divide, allying both democracy and capitalism in the global fight for liberation. In “negating the negation” within Marxism, Zizek presumes to stake out entirely new ground for the revolution. However, it’s hard to discern how this particular double negative doesn’t revert to the positive; i.e., capitalist democracy.
Maybe Zizek is more committed to his method, in a “what-if” sort of way, than to asserting any particular conclusions he generates by using the method. Or maybe he’s committed to endorsing whatever the machinery churns out, as if this is the next movement of the spirit and it’s his job to ally himself with the Tao as it undergoes its perpetual turnings as it moves through history at both the macro and the microlevel. If he were purely operating the negate-the-negation machine then in the next turn of the screw he would negate this particular negation and reaffirm something more definitively collective and resistant. Maybe that will happen next. Maybe it already is, and I’m just not well-versed enough in Z’s most recent writings.
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I’ve long been no fan of Zizek’s, because even if he changes positions, or pretends to, the new one is always an exaggeration. That, of course, would have to be the case of frequently changing positions and trying to be a particularly Visible Fence-Sitter. As such, I find it amusing to see how his lovers and haters find him so IMPORTANT. He just isn’t. But he’s definitely way more powerful than the various bloggers except the ‘elite bloggers’ like Josh Marshall, who are trying to do a form of sharp newspaper, I think, more than a blog. And they are not trying to be Movie Stars like Zizek is. That’s his Fatal Flaw. He wants to be a Movie Star, and his Screen Test wearing blue jeans on a toilet failed notably.
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“However, Zizek suggests that the surplus, the value that’s removed from the commodity, is precisely what stimulates the desire to earn and to buy”
for profit to feed back this way it would represent a Peircean thirdness and consequently an evaluable input of the kind consonant with neoclassical economics, Marx’s category of surplus, on the other hand, is a Peircean secondness by definition exceeding the situation conditioning it. Hence Zizek’s account is wrong.
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the whole fun of anti-Zizek is that he’s so blatantly a corpse propped up by this fatuous PR and yet he has this following of soi disant hipsters. It’s fun because it’s easy. Anti-Derrida, something like that, would have a very different feel.
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“It’s fun because it’s easy. Anti-Derrida, something like that, would have a very different feel.”
Would it have a Piercean firstness to it? or perhaps a Rawlsian fifthness to it?
“for profit to feed back this way it would represent a Peircean thirdness and consequently an evaluable input of the kind consonant with neoclassical economics, Marx’s category of surplus, on the other hand, is a Peircean secondness by definition exceeding the situation conditioning it.”
Except that, given the complete impossibility of more than one or two people ever paying any attention to anything you say here, that IS the case. It doesn’t matter whether you say ‘Zizek is therefore wrong.’ You have to stop talking like a student if you expect anything to happen. Otherwise, you’re just being cleverly vapid.
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what do you suggest?
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For you to become an itinerant missionary in the Baghdad Green Zone, explaining to all classes, corrupt and worker-innocent such clauses as:
“consequently an evaluable input of the kind consonant with neoclassical economics,”
In this way you will not only save the world, but will surpass Lenin’s Tomb as well. After all, words like ‘evaluable’ are even on the lips of Bangladeshis who do micro-economies and don’t need help. Therefore, you can probably get a teaching job in one of their luxury business parks as they must surely begin to sprout a la Ballard in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur (since they’ve had a ’20/20′ project for factory girls for some 15 years now, even though Kuala Lumpur isn’t in Bangladesh, hey, you know, same difference…in the meantime, wish everybody an Unhappy New Year just like that tedious Odile person. Now THAT’S true understanding that Stalin was NOT a corruption of Marx, but rather a perfectly natural outgrowth.)
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the Dhaka plan
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Luke, I’ve read only The Parallax View by Zizek, some of which I liked quite a bit, some of which I regarded as unnecessarily obfuscatory. At the time I wasn’t paying him a huge amount of attention — just curious about his approach. He tosses off so many references from so many different kinds of sources that it’s like watching someone juggling eight balls at once. I also had a sense that the book had been cobbled together from miscellaneous essays, speeches, notebook entries etc., such that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I may go back to the book to see if, when subjected to close reading, the pieces themselves start to unravel in the way this Hardt & Negri piece does.
Can you clarify Peircian thirdness and secondness? I’m not familiar with these concepts, and I have a feeling Jonquille isn’t either.
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I think I had some kind of Aspartame headache New Years Day (Happy New Year!) apologies to any Zizek readers who did not attend University. Here’s my explanation of the above:
suppose you work in a simple job, rolling cigars say, and you are paid in kind
suppose you produce 1000 cigars a day, of which you receive 500 in pay, while your boss receives 500 as profit/costs of capital
according to Dr Parallax your boss needs these 500 cigars for his work of supervising your work etc
now suppose some advance in technology means you can now produce 1500 cigars in a day
as a Marxist I suppose Dr Parallax believes you will still receive 500 cigars remuneration, while your boss now gets 1000. Accoding to Dr Parallax’ essay your boss now needs this extra 500 cigars to perform precisely the same work.
one could object to this conclusion:
* methodologically, because it theorises the worker in a different way from the capitalist (the boss’s needs slide), this is anachronistic (rather like that film where Michael Jordan acts against Bugs Bunny)
* empirically, because this isn’t how the world works
I remember hearing a similar fatuous theory from neoclassical economics, I don’t have the reference, but this at least wasn’t dressed up as Marxism
Zizek’s work is often built around ambiguities, here it’s between surplus understood qualitatively, where it’s correct, and surplus understood quantitively as per Marx.
that’s all I want to say about Zizek
kind regards
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Thanks Luke, and best wishes for 2008 to you as well. It does seem that, for Zizek in this essay, surplus occupies an exclusively mystical and symbolic role rather than an empirical place on a supply-and-demand curve. To an extent he’s right, inasmuch as the relationship between price and cost isn’t always rational. I just read the summary of a study in which subjects were given various wines to taste. For each wine the subject was told the price per bottle. One wine was served twice to the same people: once it’s an allegedly $5 wine, the other time it’s worth $80. Not too surprisingly, the subjects reported that the wine tasted better in its $80 version. But the experimenters also conducted cognitive MRI scans during the session, and it turned out that the subjects’ taste pleasure centers were more activated when they believed it was an expensive wine. So presumably the same wine REALLY DID taste better when a bigger monetary surplus was attached to it. However, the market works its magic anyhow, otherwise price competition would never stimulate shift in market share to the lower-priced producers, which clearly isn’t so. Wine is one of those commodities where the je-ne-sais-quoi is part of what you’re buying, so the results probably aren’t very generalizable.
I haven’t looked into it, but I suspect the escalating price at the pump for gasoline is more affected by manipulation of fear than by manipulation in the supply and price of crude. However, I have no evidence to support this contention. And, more generally, Z’s idea that draining surplus off to the capitalists is the unconscious desire that fuels economic activity is something I’d be prepared to test empirically. I.e., return the surplus in the form of higher wages and lower costs and then see if economic activity stagnates or accelerates.
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