whatever

Posted on | August 30, 2004 |

Currently planning for the upcoming Italian Effect conference, which promises to be a real doozy, what with all the preceding introspection and psychological warfare (too many academics have been watching the Olympics!) and the prospect of a showdown between theory heads and indymedia types. crikey! and people reckon the left is dead. if it is, it’s only because its advocates are so good at wounding each other… i’m up to my eyeballs in hardt, negri, bifo, agamben and gramsci (who still gets my vote–there are too many porn references in agamben for me to ever fully trust him).

at the moment i plan to argue that guantanamo bay is an ‘exception’ even to agamben’s idea of the camp; indeed that it’s a further and no less horrific development. whereas the camp operates on the fate of its prisoners having been stripped of all rights, trading purely on their status as human, in the different circumstances of the holy war we’re in now (by which I mean the battle between evangelical Christianity and radical Islam) the terrorist label works so well by taking away even that status. terrorists are sub-human, even animal, for they don’t subscribe to the necessary belief in the sanctity of human life (the ‘rules of war’ as one interviewee put it last week). when this is the case, we know that all kinds of badness can be condoned. as agamben puts it, in reference to auschwitz, the question is one of the ‘juridical procedures and political devices’ employed or negated such that ‘human beings could have been so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime (at this point, in fact, truly anything had become possible)’. (Means without End: 44)

regardless of the varying and mobilising definitions of the virtual-actual-real continuum thrashed out in the legacy of italian thought, my point will be that a radical politics which relies on the virtual has to contend with the Right’s current success in this crucial aspect of the political terrain. our best hope may well be a politics of the multitude, a mass of whatever singularities (if you like that lingo), but personally i think Liam Lynch is on to something: at the moment it’s still the United States of Whatever. (I’m thinking of using this remix of the track to start the paper).

like many others, bifo claims that mobility, speed and flexibility characterise ÔøΩthe plane of ruleÔøΩ in society today, but nonetheless it’s clear the effects and outcomes of this rule remain the same: stasis, confinement, inflexibility, deferred and ambiguous process, torture. to that end, i’m starting to come round to deleuze’s view on this one. human rights? bleh. it’s all about situations, and with them, jurisprudence. that’s why we need to ask, ‘Where is the law in “unlawful combatant”?

Category: Research

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