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Want to be active? This is what the movement for good says:

What is an active citizen?

An active citizen…

• Speaks positively about South Africa
• Upholds our constitution and the laws of the land
• Takes part in our democracy
• Does not bribe or buy stolen goods
• Participates in community projects
• Is sensitive to the needs of the less fortunate
• Respects the environment
• Believes that they can make a difference
• Lives by the notion – ‘I am because we are’

…and so much more!

Founding members of the Movement for Good

I love the first one.

from here

Agamben notes that if the paradigm of divine economy, in countering the objections of the monarchians, had reconciled the doctrine of the trinity with monotheism, “it ended up introducing into god a split, a division between being and action, ontology and economy” (Agamben, 2007). God’s action, that is his economy, appears here without foundation in god’s being, and was for the early church fathers, thus, “literally an anarchical mystery”. For Agamben, this becomes clear when we reread, from this perspective, the “merciless and long lasting” controversy around Arianism.  Departing from traditional account of the controversy, agamben points out that while both sides agreed that both the son and the father were generated from eternity, the disput turned on whether it could be said that the son had foundation in the father. The critical fissure between the Nicene fathers and Arian teachings was thus the propostion of an essential “anarchical character – that is to say, without arche, without foundation, without beginning – of the son, of the Christ”. Aryus, for instance, had argued that the son, as logos, the word and action of god, was grounded in god and was not in this sense anarchical like the father. The Nicene view, which was to become the orthodoxy, “stated firmly that the son, the Christ is anarchos”. From this perspective, the son is said to have no foundation or beginning, and is in this sense exactly like the father. And it is precisely for this reason that the notion of will takes on such importance in Christian theology, figuring as the privileged mode of to connecting these two anarchical elements, gods being or nature and gods action or economy.

If theologians would increasingly come to see theology and economy as two separate discourses, corresponding respectively to each pole in this division between god’s being and god’s action, here, as in the Arian controversy, we see the continued influence of a paradigm of a Trinitarian economy developed by the early church fathers (kotsoko). For agamben, the “ominous inheritance” that “Christian theology bequeaths to modernity” is seeded with this thesis of the anarchy of the Christ which definitively separates language and action from being. From this moment, he argues, the “substantial link” that had been conceived by “classical Greek ontology, between being and logos, being and language, but also between being and praxis, action, is ruined forever”. Returning to Aristotle he points out that where, for the latter, god moves the world and the heavens, not because he wants to, but because “his being coincided with this action”, in the writings of the Christian fathers this perspective is reversed, and god being becomes definitively separated from god action. What gives this reversal its particularly ominous character is that this separation of being from action will have the effect of rendering the ontological basis of conceptions such as politics and ethics “extremely problematic”. Indeed, for agamben the question of government itself, only becomes possible, even necessary, in this light, since government - which comes from the Greek word kybernetes , meaning to pilot or guide a ship - would be impossible in relation to substantial unity between being and action. Critically however, government conceived as oikonomia, will retain this essential anarchical character, ‘causing Agamben to remark:

When on of the main characters in Pasolini film ‘salo’ says, ‘the only real anarchy is the anarchy of power’, and Walter Benjamin writes that, ‘there is nothing so anarchical as the bourgeois order’, their statements have to be taken extremely seriously.

I really need a new dictionary. I have two, but they both shit. This is the one i want

The problem is that it cost $895 dollars on amazon, which roughly works out to around 6700 without postage (but i should be able to get it here for around that price). I don’t have this money…least of all for a dictionary. So i was thinking…i can offer my services, and that of this blog, to anyone willing to make a contribution to this set (which, no doubt, will one day be used by my children). There isn’t really a limit to what i am prepared to do, but it would need to be done remotely…that is something i can do from or on my computer (this would include the promotion of this or that cause, or even to defaming an enemy or someone you don’t like). essentially i am offering my labour to whomever might need it, or if you want, you can simply make a donation…

so, if there are pledges, work offers, or simply ideas for how i can raise 6700, just leave a comment.

Lecture 3 (audio)

[not edited so ignore typos (as always). based on the power and glory lecture, and other bits and pieces on the net]

Agamben’s latest intends to clarify the sense in which two paradigms that derive from early Christian theology lead to what he calls the modern governmental machine. In this respect he comments:

 “Political theology grounds in the one god transcendence of sovereign power and, and this is the new thing, economical theology, which basis itself on the notion of an Oikonomia, an economy conceived as an immanent order, domestic and not properly politcal [?] of both human and divine life. The first paradigm [political theology] is juridical, or juridical-political, and will give rise to the modern theory of sovereignty. The second one [economical theology] is managerial and will lead to modern biopolitics, up to the present domination of economy and management over all aspects of social life” (Agamben, 2007)

In earlier work Agamben discussed the sense in which our paradigm of sovereignty derives from political theology. With this new work, Agamben again mobilises Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis, that modern political concepts are secularised theological concepts, only to extend it to the governmental paradigm, and our conception of ‘economy’. Thus, if state of exception was book about law, Il Regno e la Gloria is a book about theology. Agamben is however explicit that he is by no means proposing a return to theology, which appears here as part of the unfolding homo sacer project only as a means to understand the modern problem of government. But, he is no less clear that if State of Exception had presented a challenge to jurists to “confront this juridical condition from their viewpoint”, with the new line of research he is doing the same, and inviting theologians “to confront as theologians the problem oikonomia”, the removal of which, he argues, has had “sinister consequences both in theology and politics” (agamben and sacco, 2007). The starting point of his Power and glory lecture is thus what he describes the “amazing role” played by the Greek term oikonomia in Patristic debates around the trinity in the 2nd Century (Agamben, 2008).

Agamben begins, however, as he often does, by dislocating the question, and drawing it back to Greek thought. His strategy here is twofold. On the one hand Agamben intends to outline the semantic core of ‘oikonomia’, that later gets extended to the theological realm (kotsoko, 2008). But, as in homo sacer, the return to the Greeks has a more subtle strategic value for the broader agambenian project, allowing him to to begin marking out the ontological stakes embedded in the transition to the governmental paradigm. Thus, Agamben points out that in greek thought iokonomia designated management of the oikos, or household. This was for instance how it appears in Aristotle for whom economy (oikonomia) differed from “politics, in the same way that oikos, the household differed from the city” (Agamben, 2007), a difference that must, Agamben insists, be understood substantively rather than quantitatively (Agamben and Sacco, 2007).  Emphasising the “sharp opposition” between the two, agamben argues that for the Greeks, politics could not be reduced to an economy (agamben, 2007). Since for Aristotle, iokonomia, whose “decisions and measures can be understood only in relation to a given situation, or to a given problem” (agamben, 2007), the very immanence of model to the things it directs, here blocks it from becoming an epistemic paradigm, and thereby a science. In the Sacco interview, however, he makes clear that, for the Greeks, iokos was conceived in terms that were broader than the model of the family:

The oikos, the greek household, was a complex organsism with different intertwined relations, stretching from family in the strict sense to master-slave relations and the management of agricultural enterprises of often large dimensions. What holds the system together is a paradigm that we can define as ‘managerial’: it is a system that is neither held down by a set of norms nor constitutes an episteme (agamben and Sacco, 2007)

The proper translation of the greek term iokonomia is therefore management, as it appears in Lidell-Scott dictionary (agamben, 2007, Agamben Sacco 2007). Thus, we find the “inevitable metaphor” of the ship rediscovered in Xenophon’s Oeconomica, to underline again the proper place of ‘things’, an order, so to speak, in relation to a need for oversight and management (wallerstein).

Having outlined the anceint greek sense of the term okonomia, (Kotsoko, 2008), Agamben now proceeds to answer the question of why theologians would have had recourse to this notion, which literally meant management. The entry of the notion of into theological discourse is traced to conflicts around the doctrine of the holy trinity in the 2nd century, focused around a group called the Monarchians (sp?), or as Agamben notes, ‘the partisan to the government of the one’. Betraying his sympathy with their argument, he points out that the Monarchians objection to the doctrine of the trinity stemmed from the belief that “the introduction in God of three persons simply meant falling back onto polytheism”. Since renouncing either monotheism, or the doctrine of the trinity, was unthinkable, oikonomia would become the notion through which Christian theology attempted “reconcile in god, the unity with the trinity”. Agamben outlines the argument as follows:

God, as far as his substance or being is concerned, is absolutely one. But – as for his oikonomia, his economy, that is to say the way he manages the divine house and life, - he is three. Just as the master of the house – this was the argument – can share administration with the son or with other persons, without loosing the unity of his power, in the same way, god can trust the management of the world and the salvation of man to his son, the Christ. (agamben 2007)

The common viewpoint is that the notion of economy gains a properly theological meaning with Paul whose letters speak of an “economy of the mystery of salvation” in relation to the question of redemption. However, economy here is said to refer to paul’s free management of the task assigned to him (kotsoko, 2008), and would not have been intended to imply something like a “divine plan”. Agamben however points to the strategically crucial reversal of the phrase in Ireneaues, Hipolitus, and tertullian who now begin to speak of the “mystery of the economy”, and it is with this shift that that economy becomes a technical theological concept to describe intra Trinitarian relations. In hippolytus, for instance, the unity of god is expressed as dynamis, while his multiplicity appears precisely as oikonomia (wallerstein). Agamben notes that here, it is “no longer god’s being that is mysterious, it is his economy, his action, his activity that is mysterious” (agamben, 2007). The very fact that god can entrust aspects of the management of the world to the angels (as in Tertullian) or the son, does not undercut the singularity and transcendence of god, but is seen, instead, as its “fulfilment”, in the sense that the “sheer profusion of proxies and subordinated messages testifies to the altitude and transcendence of the master, whose dignity resides in not attending to all the details of the house” (Wallernstein). The mystery of the economy is thus god’s action, or praxis, his articulation in the multiplicity of the trinity, and the sense in which every event takes on a mysterious meaning in the economy of salvation, understood as divine management of the world and human history.

There is a bit in Negri’s review of Il Regno e la Gloria about a “lost subject”. The problem with Negri’s formulation aside, we should perhaps still ask what happens to “the subject” in Agamben.

His EGS lecture, ‘What is a dispositor?’ has something to say here. [Dispositor is his (perhaps playful) suggestion for translating Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositif’ - which usually get translated, badly he argues, as procedure or apparatus. To be sure, however, Foucault’s  notion is stretched, almost to the point of breaking, to literally become “everything that has in some way, the capacity of capturing, determining, orientating, intercepting, shaping, guiding, securing or controlling the behaviors, the gestures, the opinions, the discourse of living beings or substances” (for agamben this concerns not just hospitals, prisons, etc,  but also stuff like writing and literature… even language appears as a dispositif/dispositor: “perhaps the first dispositor is language itself, in which one day, in the beginning of humanity, a living being let itself be captured”)]. He says:

So we have two huge categories, beings and dispositors and between the two, the subject. I call the subject what results from the relationship, in the hand-to-hand struggle of the substance and the dispositif [dispositor]. In this sense, the individual can be the place of a multiplicity of processes of subjectiviation…so that, to the indefinite proliferation of dispositors, that defines the present phase of capitalism, will correspond an indefinite proliferation of subjectivities, which give the impression of the eradication of the category of subjectivity, but is not an abolition of it, but more properly and infinite splitting and  and dissemination of subjectivities

The subject thus turns out to be proof of the living beings capture (but then also of resistance in a sense).

[this makes me uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean it is not right. but, if use without right is the key to what he calls ‘profanation’, it is not only the thing of monks… and we do well to search in our own times for experiments that highlight this mode of escape]

[from influxus]

[the text below was sent by LP. I had initially put it up as a separate post, but mysteriously managed to delete it.]

Hey everyone

Sorry I’ve been absent. Academic labour is certainly making me think about value. My first three weeks as a lecturer have made me ask just how the labour theory of value can be applied to this kind of labour – immaterial and affective labour. If we consider that the social determination of what constitutes necessary labour time is not the same as that described in Capital with regard to commodity production, what does this mean for value? In the case of immaterial and affective labour, the process of ‘production’ is not uniform nor is it determined by a set number of tasks through which a set number of quantifiable ‘products’ emerge. The determination of what constitutes necessary labour time is therefore always under social contestation by those who contribute their labour time to the process. For example, I am not required to contribute a set number of hours to my academic work, neither are my ‘teaching time’ and ‘research time’ neatly allocated. Rather, it is up to me to decide how and how much time I contribute towards ‘developing my academic career’ or, as I would see it, contributing to the production of knowledge through learning, teaching and writing. Right now, it would seem that other academics in my dept have adopted their own individual relationships to this process, either embattled due to problems with the process and the feeling that they cannot seek recourse through it, or trying to advance individual careers. Time is either withheld at the expense of the collective production of knowledge or time is contributed, often without remuneration, in the advancement of the individual production of knowledge. Just some thoughts I’ve been having, but that also go back to readings of Negri, Hardt and Cleaver that we might want to take up after Capital. Certain things are also becoming clearer to me now; so sorry if I’m rambling off on things we’ll be doing later.

I also found this chapter quite long, but here are some of the questions it (and the lecture) raised for me:
Is Marx ‘reductionist’? According to Harvey, he is because he believes that every thing and relation can be explained in terms of the labour process or reduced to its constitution in the labour process. However, if we try to characterise Marx’s understanding of the labour process as a single, fixed, known set of occurrences, we cannot. This is precisely because his understanding of the labour process begins with its constitution in the social i.e. through the actions of individuals in engagement with each other. In this way, Marx’s method (which we’ve now seen in action in his exploration of the commodity form, and which Harvey emphasises in the first lecture in terms of fluidity and motion) reduces only to abstract again, always moving from ‘the concrete’ to ‘the abstract’ and back again to another concrete… For me, most important in this chapter is Marx’s description of the material (the commodity) as the product of social relations (socially necessary labour) and social relations as the product of the material, and the mystery (or mysteriousness) of this aspect of the system of production or the labour process. Because, I think that it is here that we are able to see the potential for the mystery of the system to be revealed through the social recognition of the ways in which labour time comes to form the basis for exploitation in capitalist society. And, the potential for struggle against exploitation, and therefore the potential for the process to be changed.

The dual nature of the commodity and its representation of value – I hope I’m not going down a blind alley here, but a couple of bells started ringing when I read this chapter, related to the use of the word ‘representation’ in the discussion about exchange value being a ‘bearer’ of value. In my own understanding, what Marx is trying to show is that the expression of value in exchange value hides (or mystifies) the fact that human labour is at its core and forms the common element that allows it to exist. In addition, the determination of exchange value is based on a social process through which the labour time necessary to produce a commodity is calculated. Spivak (in her article, Can The Subaltern Speak) states that Marx uses the word ‘darstellen’ in reference to exchange value as a representation of value. She also points out that there are two ways of speaking about ‘representation’ in German – using the word ‘darstellen’, meaning to portray as in a painting or photograph, or the word ‘vertreten’, meaning to speak on behalf of as a delegated leader of a group of people would. While Marx uses the word ‘darstellen’ here, in relation to exchange value, it would seem to me that it is precisely the elision of the dual meaning that the word ‘representation’ has that is also at play in the expression of value in exchange value – that a price does not show the human labour that went into producing the commodity. I know it may seem finicky here, but I think that we should look out for this dual meaning of ‘representation’ in the words ‘represent’ and ‘bear’ or ‘bearer’ as we continue to read.
Spivak explores the use of the words ‘darstellen’ and ‘vertreten’ in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm. I don’t have the time to follow this now, but it would probably be interesting for those of you interested in the question of government. She looks specifically at the issue of delegated representation in the form of speaking on behalf of.
So, that’s it for now. Let’s hope I can keep this up…