tempus fugitives

If you haven't already read their two current essays, that seek to articulate the complex play of the anxious and oddly hopeful structures of feeling that are currently at large, with multiple senses of tempo and temporality, and uses to which judgement can be put, then I invite and urge you to click through to Aloof from inspiration and Ads without Products talking about and through the times they're feeling and thinking and writing. Brilliantly.

Their essays have me wondering if we are in the midst of a [re]turn to thinking about time? The spatial turn in literary theory that I passed through in the 1990s, which was inculcated in me through postcolonial novels and theory, certainly holds a promising vista out before you. Authors of the Dark Side of the Dream, Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in a recent essay “What was postcolonialism?” argue that its moment has passed and that it was ultimately built on the premises of a singular modernity which, with its endless capitalist-based renewals and innovations, invites us to believe that its ruptures and breaks provide ‘posts’ from which the vista of the past can be laid out and tinkered with. They effectively ask: in what ways is ‘colony’ so distinct from the workings of capitalism that there can be a postcolonialism but no postcapitalism? Leigh Dale from U of Queensland has asked if capitalism worked in the grooves that colonialism cut? Is it enough to be postcolonial but ignore or let pass the question of postcapitalism?

I think the stakes in these questions form around temporalities and time more than they do space. Indeed, what are financial derivatives but highly complex temporal forms. How do we come to terms with multiple-speed economies like the one we have in Australia where a mining boom in parts of Western Australia and Queensland, feeding coal and iron ore to China, is funding parts of the national economy while other regions are in recession. How do we think economic and ecological problems together if not through tempos, rhythms, temporalities?

The spatial turn has also been the scopic and visual turn. Yet we feel rhythms, and all our senses measure durations: a smell from childhood that returns, like old sandshoe sweat, returns with measure: two points in time make a basic measure and rhythm. As Aloof writes crisis is the moment in which the times are unsettled and calling for the cure and judgement. Another way to put this is to say that the times can be harmonised – a eurhythmia. Henri Lefebvre writes:

At no moment have the analysis of rhythms and the rhythmanalytical project lost sight of the body. Not the anatomical or functional body, but the body as polyrhythmic and eurhythmic (in the so-called normal state). As such, the living body has (in general) always been present: a constant reference. The theory of rhythms is founded on the experience and knowledge of the body; the concepts derive from this consciousness and this knowledge, simultaneously banal and full of surprises - of the unknown and the misunderstood.

Along with arrhythmia, isorhythmia (the equality of rhythms) completes this repertoire of fundamental concepts. With one reservation: iso- and eu-rhythmia are mutually exclusive. There are few isorhythmias, rhythmic equalities or equivalences, except of a higher order. On the other hand, eurhythmias abound: everytime there is an organism, organisation, life (living bodies).

In this respect, thought could return to the Liebnizian principle apparently abandoned by philosophers, logicians and scientific types. Were there isorhythmia between two temporalities, they would coincide. Equivalence entails identity (and reciprocally, non-identity implies difference); polyrhythmia is composed of diverse rhythms. Eurhythmia (that of the living body, normal and healthy) presupposes the association of different rhythms. In arrhythmia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronisation (the usual term for designating this phenomena). A pathological situation - agreed! - depending on the case; interventions are made, or should be made, through rhythms, without brutality. (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 2004: 67.)

So, the VP debate promises another Palin performance like the one she gave at the Grand Old Party's convention [see a video montage of the Palinator in debate mode from her run for the Alaskan Governor-ship]. The bail-out bill should get through the lower house and I'm up to my armpits in thesis completion deadline world. Time is running away. Down the street, toward the beach. Jumping ship. Fugiting.

Reg-u-later: Liberal Governmentalities

Having been immersed in Foucauldian-based Governmentality writings on neoliberalism of late I've been tempted to contribute to some blog threads where the talk is over the Wall St crisis and one line of debate is structured around the bring-back-regulation vs the we-are-already-overregulated polemics. One comment I endorse is here:

Tom N. said:
ANOTHER BORING STOUSH BETWEEN STRAW ECONOMIC MEN

Reading the soft-left media and blogs over recent weeks, together with retorts along the lines of Rafe’s post*, has reminded me of the barrenness of the “free-market vs government” debate. It seems that, for a number of people in the former group, the US meltdown is conclusive evidence of the failure of free markets, and all those economists who believe in markets free from government intervention - an empty set, but never mind - need to learn the lesson and repent. This line of argument has reminded me of Michael Pussey’s [sic] misrepresentations of “nasty narrow-indeed New Right neoclassical economic rationalists” a decade or so back. KRudd’s recent revelation that there is a role for government intervention, not just market forces, is another example of the false characterisation of the practice of economics.

In reality, day-to-day economic policy advising is - as it has long been - about optimum levels and the design of regulation; not whether or not there should be any. Similarly, no economist I know thinks that the appropriate place of the free market is anywhere other that in the textbook, as a useful device for thinking about some matters, but not as something that should, or could, exist in practice in a modern society.

Of course, discussion of the nuts and bolts of good regulation and policy is unlikely to keep the interest of many readers, so one can understand the attractiveness of “government vs market” type grand narratives. I just wish commentators would label this stuff “fiction”. Perhaps its another case for appropriate regulation.

Late-Foucault scholar, and yes there is a late-late Foucault emerging as the English transationas of his College de France Lectures are still coming, Thomas Lemke writes:

The concept of governmentality . . . proves useful in correcting the diagnosis of neo-liberalism as an expansion of economy in politics, that takes for granted the separation of state and market. The argument goes that there is some "pure" or "anarchic" economy that will be "regulated" or "civilised" by a political reaction of society. But as we know since Marx there is no market independent of the state, and the economy is always a political economy.

Foucault's discussion of neo-liberal governmentality shows that the so-called "retreat of the state" is in fact a prolongation of government, neo-liberalism is not the end but a transformation of politics, that restructures the power relations in society. What we observe is not a diminishment or a reduction of state sovereignty and planning capacities but a displacement from formal to informal techniques of government and the appearance of new actors on the scene of government (e.g. NGOs), that indicate fundamental transformations in statehood and a new relation between state and civil actors.

From "Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique"


Calls for a return to regulation miss the opportunity to have a debate about the how, who, what and aims of techniques of government (the conduct of conduct). There's an interesting post at Mark Davis' blog where he articulates the disappointing recommendations on the carbon emissions reduction scheme to regulation in the financial markets and the sense that the Neoliberal era might be over and that a new paradigm is needed. As Lemke's quotes above seek to make clear, the separation of economy and state, whether the economy is rule-of-the-jungle anarchic or a beautiful self-regulating machine conducted by the invisible hand, is a form of liberal rationality and provides the basis on which practices of government forms its problems in need of solution.

Foucault talks instead of the state as subject to governmentalisation. This is certainly evident in the embedding of market rationalities (forms of knowledge and reasoning, vocabularies) into apparatuses of the state over the last 35 years: managerial & enterpreneurial regimes, flexible, competitive and efficient teams. While one understanding of these changes is that they evidence the abandonment of the state to the market, the expansion of the state contradicts what amounts to the ideological rhetoric that masks the practices of a Neoliberal governmentalisation of the state. Rather than the economy overpowering the state Neoliberalism amounts to political techniques of conducting behaviour that are based on market practices and reasoning, against a desired for horizon of market-enabled plenitude.

While I don't think we can go back to Keynesian practices of government, and clearly neoliberal modes have proven to be atopic (like atopic illnesses - asthma and eczema - where the symptoms of the disease are temporally deferred and physically displaced) in that they generate power through payouts and interest from finance capital for an elite who are immunised from the toxic waste that their wealth abjected, my feeling is that we should be looking to a combination of rhythms of governmentalities: a healthy harmony of governmental rhythms or eurhythmia of government. The danger is that there will be a call, fearful and even religious, for an isorhythmia.

America is Waiting . . . [David Byrne and Brian Eno]

Labor (representation) ->Value (representation) -> Money (transformation) -> Capital & the Generative mise en abyme

Fragments of citations posted here that I'm attempting to seam together in order to think the form of Anthony Macris' 1997 Capital, volume one: to think the form of it as 'the work of the negative' and an 'open-endedness of textuality' that is not indifference, but is 'indequation, rupture'.

From Spivak's 'Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value' (In Other Worlds)

"This textualization can be summarized as follows: the utopian socialists seemed to be working on the assumption that money is the root of all evil: a positive origin. Marx applies the dialectic to this root and breaks it up through the work of the negative. At each step of the dialectic something seems to lead off into the open-endedness of textuality: indifference, inadequation, rupture."(160)

‘It is not in the unilinear progressive account of the emergence of the money-form . . . that is Marx’s main “discovery”. It is in the full account of value-formation that the textuality of Marx’s argument (rather than the recuperable continuist schema) and the place of use value is demonstrated, and the predication of the subject as labor-power (irreducible structural super-adequation – the subject defined by its capacity to produce more than itself) shows its importance.” (157)

Anthony Macris 'Claude Simon and the emergence of the generative mise en abyme', AUMLA 99 May, 2003: 50-66)

"We can, in fact, think of contemporary capitalism as a kind of machine that writes itself into existence: as one vast, multi-functional, ever-expanding Gmea [Generative mise en abyme] that produces objects and services, images of objects and services, verbal descriptions of objects and services, and that configures and reconfigures them again and again in an endless series of variations driven by the valorisation cycle. Caught up in this vast system, the novel form circulates throughout it as a commodified linguistic entity, its characters and situations often reflecting the world through which it moves. And not only the novel: narratives of all kinds circulate throughout it, moving all the more quickly if they are for realising profit for their producers. . . .The capitalist image machine creates whole after whole, miniature after miniature, pumping out texts that mix differing orders of signification and materiality, playing out its endless mise en abyme across the entire urban landscape."

"To sum up the novelistic Gmea is broadly characterised by the following features:
1) An implosion of hierarchy between framing and embedded novel elements.
2) An emphasis of those elements on market processes, especially those related to capitalism's scriptural, image-producing and organisational technologies.
3) Forms of novelistic textuality that overlap and interface with originary capitalist texts.

4) A generativity of such intertextuality driven by the valorisation process." (63)

Spivak's argument is that Marx discovers, in the movement from Labor to Value to Money to Capital, not a continuous chain, not an origin from which value emerges ex nihilo [out of nothing], but rather the discontinuity, the ruptural, the endless/origin-less generativity of textuality. Marx's key insight - via spivak's reading - seems to be that exchange value is surplus to use-value, and the the social labor expended in producing the commodity, has the possibility of a superadequation, an excess of balance between use and exchange value, for the labouring subject. It is the emergence of the possibility of there being a superadequation that Spivak hones in on, and which she considers to be an operation of textuality: of linguistic creation.

For Macris the generativity of this textuality is both an aspect of consumer capitalism (post-fordist capitalism), and a formal technique that can be theorised and practised in fictional narrative. Thus the creation, or better, the generation of Value (whether aesthetic or ethical), is almost web-like across our culture by virtue of cultural-capitalism's colonisation of aesthetic and ethical fields. Macris might be suggesting, in his novel, that in order to generate Value (aesthetic and ethical) that is not stamped with commodity fetishism we need to go into the underground of the Value creating machine and witness its less than shiny working machinery; its exhausts and pressure ducts; the dirt and grit. This is the work of negation: to present a phenomenon as negative in order to clear the way for something else.

The question is, what possible opportunity for the re-presentation of this alterity when the method of presentation is negative-critical? This question brings up the rhythmanalysist's perspective. Rather than posit a new system of value, perhaps the work of the negative is multiple - there are older tempos and temporalities that reappear & re-presence in the time-space vacated by the force of the work of the negative. Derrida's hauntology in his reflections on disjointed time in Specters of Marx is another way to articulate this notion of multiple-rhythms constellating so as to sound their movement toward a rhythmic harmony.

It seems counter-intutitive to talk of harmony and negativity together. In musical terms we associate harmony with together-ness, euphony. This is not, however, technicallly accurate. Harmony, or tonality, is both consonance and dissonance. In order to think beyond harmony we can turn to Adorno's writings on Schoenberg's innovations with 12-tone music. Alternatively, we can turn to the polyrhythms of Steve Reich's, or Philip Glass's pulse-pattern repetition music. Another sounding of this non-harmonic polyrhythmia can be heard in the Necks' pieces.

What then might it mean to suggest that fictional narrative could generate a movement of rhythms that are, yes, negative but that such negations are how the movement is impelled, and that the eurhythmia that might be felt [see Lefebvre on the body - first post] is felt in patterns that have no use for judgements on the negativity of their initial provenance? [I'll come back to this - and go and listen to The Necks!]

In Mark Sanders' introduction to the theories of Spivak, he amplifies hre insertion of a textual dimension to the transition from labour power to exchange Value and, importantly, use value in Marx's writings. Key to Spivak's understanding of Marx after Derrida, is that money is the unrecognised supplement, which shows all the marks of writing. further, Derrida fails to distinguish between commercial and industrail capital: that money and circuits of exchange, are secondary to labour-power and production. This can lead to a mistaking of Marx's understanding of use-value's basis in labour power. For in the sphere of production "There one finds ' the necessary and essential super-adequation of labour-power to itself: it is in the nature of labour-power to create more value than it consume.'" (Spivak from 'Speculation on reading Marx' cited in Sanders Live Theory introduction: 55)

For Spivak exchange-value is a text and a representation: it has a differantial [sic] chartacter:

"This means that use-value, which Marx defines as what is left over when exchange-value is subtracted from the thing, is a theoretical fiction."

And for Sanders, Spivak next refers to "the definitive passage in the canon':

"In the exchange-relation of commodities their exchange-value appears to us as totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract their use-value from the product of labour, we obtain their value, as it has just been defined. The common element that represents itself in the exchange-relation or exchange-value of the commodity, is thus value."(Capital, 1: 128)

The key terms here are 'abstract' and 'represent'. The answer to the question, not what is Value, but how is it produced, is, for Spivak, tied to how value abstracts and represents itself out of labour power. This representation and abstraction is textual: it works through supplementarity, through differance (the deferrals and differences of meaning that structure and move signs - as understood as signifiers.)

What sort of labour power is present in narrative fiction? Its writing is production, and yet such a production is made in the consumption, or reading. As Roland Barthes, in particular, argues, there is the doxa of a reading that accepts the conventional expectations, into which a text plays, as being those through which the reading is consumed: for Barthes this is the readerly response. Alternately, there is the reading that is impelled to effectively write the text, not least because the forms of the text exceed conventional consumption: the writerly text. Making the text run is the allusive term Barthes deploys to connote this writerly production. While 'run' summons up a thread loosened from a garment, or human locomotion , it is also machinic - like a generator. The text that 'runs' comes close to evoking the dynamism that Macris locates in the Generative mises en abyme of some of Claude Simon's work. I think, also, Macris's own novel, where the dynamism of a text that dances, more than runs, that at times sounds like eurhythmia, rather than the fordist clunk and grind of Chicago-blues based rock (from Muddy Waters to Nirvana), is that textuality of a labour power that is super adequate because it is, also, a machine for generating negations.

The questions I leave this post with are: What is this desire for unalienated labour - for an unmediated utility (or use-value)? What does labour act upon - what are the raw materials - of spectacular capitalism: the capitalism of the post-Warhol world?

What use is Macris' 1997 Capital, volume one?

PS: More thoughts on Marx's theory of value here at Roughtheory. org [link]

Mania: Abel Tasman and Freud

In an essay that has become more analysed and used in this decade (amongst literary-cultural studies types like moi), Freud wrote about mania as being a failure to re-cathect (to re-invest) the libido to a new object of love. In the manic phase this failure is something like the actions of an old telephone-switchboard operator, grabbing one plugged-lead after another and making connections. But . . . the connections are ephemeral. Overheard conversations (intimate, bureaucratic) between other-people. The mania is in the flurry of connecting and in the electricity of the making of connections. An image of how I imagine the brain synapses are sparking during a manic episode.

What has been lost - whether ideal, artefact, person - must instead, Freud argues, be mourned. And this work takes time - new objects must replace the lost. If only it were that easy.

What then might it mean to reside in the meat-world in Tas-mania? A state of connective hits on the switchboard of global society? Tasman comes from Abel Tasman - Dutch explorer & mercantile scout. A small island state in a federation of states - the Commonweath of Australia. Is this state also one of loss - of overhearing the intimate and bureaucratic conversations of others?

Looking around where I live, a sort of village-suburbia not far from the capital city of Tasmania, the sense of loss is marked in the Bushfire memorial at the end of Beach Rd, Snug; in the Cemetry next to the small Catholic church; in the stories of the Carbide Works on the hill towards Electrona. More melancholy than mania. Although to look down my street towards some hectares that were farms, and see two disconnected, dead-end roads with kerb and guttering still fresh and large signs advertising lots with sold-stickers announcing the coming of more residences, shops. A sort of mania of development.

A rhythmics of dissonance? Arrhythmia?

Something is being lost here. And what is new has manic rhythms: iso- and ar-rhythmics, perhaps.

If Abel Tasman's name inaugurates this mania of development, these manic rhythms, then what might it mean to be in Eurhythmania?

Sweet Dreams are made of trees

Not one of my favourite bands of the 1980s, but Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox's Eurhythmics, ticked a few boxes: synthesizers, drum machine, songcraft, lush orchestration. While they began with an icy Germanic feel, their movement into pop-soul was much less interesting.

But after more than a quarter of a century it's their name that intrigues. Was it a neologism? Something to do with Europe? Clearly, rhythm is a separate word - but eurhythmics??

Here's Henri Lefebvre from Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life:

At no moment have the analysis of rhythms and the rhythmanalytical project lost sight of the body. Not the anatomical or functional body, but the body as polyrhythmic and eurhythmic (in the so-called normal state). As such, the living body has (in general) always been present: a constant reference . The theory of rhythms is founded on the experience and knowledge of the body; the concepts derive from this consciousness and this knowledge, simultaneously banal and full of surprises - of the unknown and the misunderstood.

Along with arrhythmia, isorhythmia (the equality of rhythms) completes this repertoire of fundamental concepts. With one reservation: iso- and eu-rhythmia are mutally exclusive. There are few isorhythmias, rhythmic equalities or equivalences, except of a higher order. On the other hand, eurhythmias abound: everytime there is an organism, organisation, life (living bodies).

In this respect, thought could return to the Liebnizian principle apparently abandoned by philosophers, logicians and scientific types. Were there isorhythmia between two temporalities, they would coincide. Equivalence entails identity (and reciprocally, non-identity implies difference); polyrhythmia is composed of diverse rhythms. Eurhythmia (that of the living body, normal and healthy) presupposes the association of different rhythms. In arrhythmia, rhythms break apart, alter and bypass synchronisation (the usual term for designating this phenomena). A pathological situation - agreed! - depending on the case; interventions are made, or should be made, through rhythms, without brutality. (67)

What does eurhythmia sound like? Is it limiting to narrow down rhythms to what we hear? What about the rhythms, the durations, the repetitions, of seeing birds flying between trees, of the taste of coffee every morning, of the smell of lavender in bloom, of rubbing shampoo into your scalp??

Eurhythmia, then. Polyrhythmic - multiple rhythms. But not iso-rhythmic or arrhythmic. Perhaps, as LeFebvre puts it: a harmony of rhythms.

Sounds like . . . Bill Evans' piano solo on Miles Davis sextet's All Blues.

Bill is pictured above. Dreaming of trees?