stuff…

I speak for Mousavi. And Iran (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

Iran Conflict Isn’t Class Warfare (Hamid Dabashi)

Why are the Iranians Dreaming Again? (Ali Alizadeh)

Symbols are not enough to win this battle (Robert Fisk)

Will the cat above the precipice fall down? (Slovej Zizek)

Soon there will be nothing more for me to do apart from those things in whose doing i can (almost) say: “this is what i would wish that i am”) . Soon.

With this in mind, and to keep a promise to myself, I’m going to the archive.

The plan is to spend half a day, 3 times a week, burrowing through this city’s archives. I’m starting at Wits. The questions i am asking are scatted across this blog, and so i figured i use this space to collect some of the more interesting things that i find [1].

Starting slow i figured i would begin by making my way through one of the smaller collections housed at the Wits Archive.  I started with the Helen Suzman’s papers, essentially her archive spanning much of the period that she was a member of parliament under apartheid. To be honest, i didn’t realise how much fun it would be going through her papers, which include her press clipping, a good deal of her official and political correspondence, as well as lots of stuff about the more mundane aspects of government policy, often marked up, or including her attached notes.

Among the dozens of documents that i copied (related to stuff i am thinking about), there is a letter from the Transvaal Chamber of Industries, the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce, and the Johannesburg Afrikaanse Sakerkamer, to the then Minister of Finance and the Minister of Co-operation and Development (essentially one of the departments responsible for the social development of African townships under apartheid), dated June 1981. No doubt the representatives of capital cc’ed the letter to Helen Suzman so that she would follow up on it in parliament (this is a common aspect of much of her correspondence, and she was after all the representative for Houghton). At any rate, the letter is something of polite warning around the issues of services in soweto. In this respect however it very different from much of the liberal interventions made “on behalf of” Africans, since its real concern is ’security’, or rather securitisation.

It begins by outlining the dire financial situation of black township councils, which it attributes to the fact that their main sources of income was service charges and rentals that were “for years held below cost”. However, while the letter makes a case for cost recovery, its real aim is warn against the danger of shifting to such a paradigm too quickly. In fact it is difficult to miss the letter’s ironic critique of the governments failure to charge “fully economic site rentals” which, it is said, created the present mess (the letter of course doesn’t mention that the deeper cause of the problem was that soweto was cut of from Johannesburg’s tax base, and forced to raise revenue for development initiatives from within this extremely poor community).  It concern that the deficits of the black local councils might lead to increases in rental and services charges stems from the fact that, for capital, depoliticizing the circuits of basic services delivery was the primary governmental imperative that, they believed, should dictate the pace of movement towards “fully economic” charges.

Telling it holds out the following scenarios:

The first possibility is that the community councils vote the necessary increases in charges to meet the deficit. In this case houses could either:

(i) Households pay these increases without protests [although it is clear the letter moves from the premise that this is unlikely to happen]

(ii) Even a substantial minority of households (or even of persons who do not have houses) create disturbances: this could seriously effect the credibility of the community councils and if the disturbances are serious the damage to not only Soweto but to the economy of South Africa could be enormous. The physical damage done inside Soweto in 1976 was only a small fraction of the economic, social and political damage done to the country as a whole.

The second possibility is that the community councils refuse to vote the increases (lest they become the target of the community’s anger)

(i) The Government also refuses to provide the funds. The consequence would be total breakdown of services: no water, no electricity, no sewage, no social services for control. Clearly that is unthinkable and it cannot be allowed to happen.

(ii) The minister uses his power to impose the rent increases: thereby the credibility of the community councils system is destroyed and the issue becomes even more politicised than before, with strong physical confrontation probable and escalation of conflict likely: and the Government probably having to provide funds not only to keep services going but also to maintain order in a state of emergency

The third option, which the letter champions, is that “increases should be phased in, with far less likelihood of conflict”.

the letter ends on the following note:

Our Chambers and our members are committed to do everything possible to increase the skills and productivity of their black employees so that thereby their wages can be increased to enable them to bear the costs of financing their own local authorities and the services which individual households receive. However, householders will require some assistance in making the transition from a totally controlled township economy to a free market system.

In 1986, when the rent boycotts exploded in Soweto, i can almost imagine the bosses in their Chambers saying: ” I told you so”.

 _________________________________________________________________________

[1] This blog has been dead for some time - occupying space that could be used for something else. However, sometimes i do remember i have a blog. At times this provokes a resolution to blog more, but mostly its a reminder of things left unfinished… and so, as with all things that remind me of something I’ve left unfinished, i try to put-it-out-of-mind (unlike the unfinished TV cabinet in the middle of the lounge, putting the blog out of mind is easy). A somewhat benign (as in easy to talk about) example in this respect is the url. A year and half since i uploaded the blog to this server, i still haven’t gotten round to registering dionysusstoned.org so i can shift off the development url. Tsk.

Pushed for space on my server, however, i was forced to confront the question of what to do with the blog: either use it, or archive it on local a hard drive. At any rate it makes no sense to leave the reminder in the world to be ’stumbled’ upon. The convergence of this resolve with me return to self-selected-intellectual-work (as opposed to the shit i get paid to do) - and no doubt also my reluctance to give up (on) the blog - means i am starting up again.

Now this, was never meant to be an “academic” blog. But at a certain point some of the stuff that i had always related to somewhat pretentiously seemed to becoming a real occupation. And blogging about what i was discovering (and often misunderstanding) in the stuff i was reading for my ma, and allowing the prentention of being something like an intellectual to in fact produce ideas that could be passed onto the blog, came easy - and was often fun. And thus this became an “academic” blog.

The problem is of course is that ‘theory’ and the production of ideas should belong to the academy as an exclusive possession - the only way of doing ‘this kind of thought’ (and seemingly also the ultimate motivation for doing it). The one or two posts that lose the pretentiousness of this “academic blog”, however, are those that perhaps prefigure another way of doing ‘this kind of thought’. So,  whatever we do here, on this my “academic blog”, stands to redeem that intellectual audaciousness (grown in my 17th floor ‘basement laboratory’), as a glimpse of what I hope “it” is becoming. A reason to start up again.

 Arising out of seemingly different contexts, two statements ‘from today’ nevertheless appear connected.

The first one, no doubt, will be the subject some discussion over the coming week:

Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it).”

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. (MORE)

The second, for now, is just a blog:

The storm is, to put it briefly, the occurrence of politics, however concealed or expressive. It is the appearance of conflict over and about (as Arendt understood politics) the infra-, being-with-others, the between and beyond of relation (which is also to say, disconnection). Melinda Cooper puts it this way: “Turbulence is the event emerging from an irresolvable relation between two or more ‘flows’ that are themselves relations” (2008:7-8). In this sense, the storm emphasises the ineliminable, incalculable plurality that politics is. In its more conventional – i.e., teleological – presentations, the storm is politics as it appears ‘before’ the decision and the calculus that founds the political, or what is regarded as proper to politics and economics. It is, in any case, the conditional of the political and yet, still, the condition of politics; the con- and the tangere that is neither reducible to its specific articulations, nor swerves, nor their mastering. Within the storm, contingency is in no way the not-yet, the appeal that will necessarily culminate in decision or measure. To be sure, it can serve as pretext or opportunity for mastery, its enjoyments and delusions, but the storm nevertheless persists as trope precisely because the sensorium of politics exceeds the borders and definitions of the political, even in those moments where what is at stake and what is asserted as inevitable are those boundaries and the figures which inhabit them.

and

The climactic, then, as a means for the contemplation or exposition of contingency – but, also, in its non-meteorological definitions, as a narrative form that might give shape to a sense of politics – is nothing new. What might be new, given the current paradigmatic coincidence of environmental and financial turbulence, is a tightening of the etymological slide between the ecological and (to borrow another term from Arendt) the oikopolitical. As something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than any understanding of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens has been able to admit, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to, Arendt’s term does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household – or, put otherwise, the indistinction between politics and economics in the rise of the social, whose contours and versions of possible forms of relation are remarkably and, almost without variance, those of the national state conceived as home. It also invokes the sense in which politics comes to assume the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political (i.e., autonomous) subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national as if this were the most natural – and therefore, apolitical, eternal – thing on earth. […] (MORE)

The meaning and significance of this connection is i guess what is worth puzzling over.

And the 5th? Eish, i didn’t see that coming

No shit

“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind,” Flynt said in a statement. People were “too depressed to be sexually active”, which was “very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such, but they cannot do without sex.” He said the only way Congress could “rejuvenate” America’s sexual appetite was “by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.” There was no response from Congress to the request.

[Larry Flynt!]

I didn’t seduce you, hope seduced you. And the more you ate of it, the less you saw. You ate yourself blind

Eish! Just a week more.

[Hadn’t seen this till now: 10, nicely dark, webisodes]

The post below is, as with the last ‘PT”, protected to make it less searchable. And, as with the last, the password is ‘empire’ (by way of context, the section is the first part of the second document in our dossier on Government and Sovereignty. it follows the document, ‘resistance comes first’. also i don’t deal with the lefort very well here because i get back to it later. and i have not included the footnotes here. it also needs proofing).

Anyway i am starting to feel like i understand Foucault, or rather the stuff on power. To be sure, its taken a long time…however i might still discover, as has happened before, something that i misunderstood completely, forcing me to rethink my emerging confidence. still, if you have read the stuff, please comment, even if just to say it sounds right, or even to make clear i am talking shit.

and with that, i need to get back to it…