Seven Red

I guess it was Erin Burnett on CNBC yesterday complaining about government limitation of Wall Street bonuses. She used the traditional Reagan era “class warfare” argument, noting that the government is trying to limit the ways people “reward success.”

What success? What success was there? Pretty much all the Wall Street firms are failed businesses. Merrill Lynch is a failed business. Citigroup is a failed business. Bank of America is a failed business. These businesses have failed just as surely as the local corner video store that didn’t think  to retool for DVD, or the restaurant down the street that is always, always sadly empty. They are failed businesses. So what success is being rewarded at Merrill? There is no success, even if one particular unit happened to make more money than another. This is like the night manager at the failed video store having a slightly better terrible month than the afternoon manager: it is a pointless distinction when the business is a failed business. The only thing that distinguishes Merrill Lynch from C&G Video is scale: the failure of Merrill would have caused general misery in the society, so the people came in to prop up an essentially failed business. Merrill, Citigroup, Bank of America, etc. are all beneficiaries of a social safety net – the dole. These businesses are on the dole. And if the conservative heartlessness of the 1980′s taught us anything, it taught us that the taxpayer gets the ultimate say in the life of people on the dole. There’s a delicious inversion of Reaganism going on at all levels, as it were, as if a multitude has merely picked up the critical tools supplied by the worst of the supply-siders and turned them on the new version of the “welfare queen” – the corporate executive: what’s good for the goose, you know?

Of course, the businesses – the failed businesses – now argue that they need the bonuses in order to “retain talent.” What talent? The supposedly talented are just as surely failures as the businesses they ran into the ground with their complex schemes. Before I accept that such-and-such financial “genius” has “talent,” I’d want to see some evidence that he or she can contribute to a successful business, not these failed businesses destroyed by the bad decisions of the “talented” MBA elite. Besides, where are these people going to go? Every businesses in the financial sector has essentially failed, at least the big ones. I say let them go. Good luck finding non-bail-out related work anywhere in the fucking world. These are failed businesses, and Ms. Burnett and her colleagues at CNBC – a cesspool of completely unhinged and unreconstructed Friedmanites – will need to learn this. It is not a matter of government  preventing these businesses, these failed businesses, from rewarding success. It is a matter of the society preventing them from rewarding failure. I’m perfectly happy to use the very categories that the conservatives supplied in order to hang them (as somebody once said…).

I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. - James Joyce, Ulysses

In which I offer an analysis of the subject lines for the last three spam messages I’ve received.

1) Tired of people laughing at your small tool – The initial meaning of this statement is clear enough, with “tool,” serving as a common metaphor for penis. So, on a quick reading, one might think that the author is asking the reader a rhetorical question, the answer to which would be, well, yes. But, oh, so much more interesting. In the first place, simply on that initial reading, the subject line writer is being gender neutral: he or she doesn’t specify whether these “people” who are thus laughing are men, women, or both. The spam message seems, in other words, intent on avoiding any heteronormativity. It’s also quite complimentary in a strange way, since the reader would have had opportunity for more than one person to laugh at his small penis, and, in fact, one would even think that many such people have laughed, since the whole operation has become tiresome. So the implied reader for the rhetorical question seems to be somebody who is extraordinarily good at inducing others (of indeterminate sex and orientation) into a situation of nakedness, with the only downside being their eventual laughter at his small penis. This is a persuasive courter, but with one little flaw. In a more extended form, the question could be restated as “Aren’t you tired, dear reader, that all these people you’ve successfully convinced to go to bed with you only end up breaking up in hysterics when they catch sight of your very small penis?” But that’s just the initial reading. If we look more closely, we should notice that there is no question mark at all. The subject line, while missing any closing punctuation, could thus read as a declarative sentence rather than a rhetorical question: it is the subject line’s author who is tired of people laughing at the reader’s small tool. This is a strange sort of statement indeed. In order to buy into it, we’d have to assume that the writer, a third party, neither one of the laughers nor the small penised reader, has had access to the laughing, and has grown tired of it. Was the writer in the room on several of these occasions? Hiding in the closet, wincing? Is the writer a friend of the recipient who has had to endure many sad, alcohol-soaked tales of this recurring problem? And what would those conversation have been like? Why would the writer himself be tired of other people laughing at the reader’s misfortune? Is the writer merely compassionate? Or is there something else going on? This is very curious stuff. Of course, we are also authorized, I think, to read the statement literally, and to ignore the cultural metaphorics of the tool. Maybe there really is a small tool, like, say, a tiny little screwdriver used for detailed electronics work, and the writer is sick and tired of all the people who immediately break into penis jokes whenever the small screwdriver is removed from its delicate carrying case. Maybe the writer is a manager named Ernest in a small accounting office, and this email is not spam at all, but a misfire, meant for the tech guy, Kevin, who comes around to the office from time to time and breaks out the small screwdriver, and everybody in the office starts laughing, because Dave, the office jokester, says “Hey, that’s a pretty small tool you got there, Kevin,” and Gina the New Girl laughs and laughs, and Ernest loves Gina the New Girl, and wonders some nights if he hired her because he loved her the very instant he saw her, and the ethical problems that would entail, and he has seen her talking to Dave at Rumours Lounge after work, talking up close and giggling at his jokes, and he now fears that Dave will win her over with his humor, so he’s writing this email pleading with Kevin not to bring that damn tiny screwdriver around again, in order to deprive Dave of the opportunity for yet another knee-slapper.

2) Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again – On its face, this subject line would seem to have the same general message as #1: the implication is that by opening the message, you will learn of some technique or process by which to enlarge your penis. But a closer reading reveals several characteristics that distinguish it from #1. First, the reader is not openly laughed at by people, but rather experiences a subjective state of embarrassment. This is a key distinction, because we’re not assured that the implied reader ever does manage to get anybody in bed. This embarrassment may precede any partners, and may even prevent the reader from approaching possible partners in the first place. While the reader in #1 would thus experience the cruelty of others, the implied reader for this subject line could be thought to be at the root of his own problem in socializing. Or, alternatively, the reader may have one or more partners who do not laugh, but the reader imagines that the partner(s) may be laughing, and thus suffers a state of embarrassment. Whereas the reader for #1 experiences an objectively verifiable reaction, the reader from #2 can only refer to an inner experience, either before, during, or after the exposure of said small penis to others. I will leave it to my own readers to determine which is a sadder story: the master pick-up artist who suffers the supposed cruelty of his partners (itself a cruel irony), or the self-conscious subject who merely imagines such cruelty, and is tortured into inaction because of it. But again, we might read the subject line another way. Specifically, the term “little one” is often used to refer to one’s children; indeed, as I learned when she frequented new parent bulletin boards after babygirl’s birth, it is the common phrase, and even often abbreviated as LO. So, this subject line, like the last one, may not be about penises at all, but about parents who are embarrassed by the behavior of their own children. What does the subject line promise? Behavior modification for small children? Or some method for parents to get over themselves and allow their kids to just be kids? And really, we might ask again which version is more tragic: the shy and humiliated man who cannot meet people because of his embarrassment over his penis, or the parent who recoils at the behavior – perhaps innocent – of his or her own child? The subject line tells a sad story, in any case. And we also might attend to the error – presumably a typo – of “every again.” The substitution of the non-standard “embarrassed of” rather than the more common prepositional usage of “embarrassed by” would suggest that the error really is an error, in which case, what a rich and meaningful mistake it is! Or is it a mistake? Did the writer mean to include a noun after “every,” rather than actually meaning to write “ever.” Was this a verbal tic that was never corrected in revision? Could it have said “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every morning play date,” or “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every time you hire a hooker.” Maybe the writer didn’t want to specify, and decided to use “again” instead, but simply forgot to delete “every.” We’ll never know, I guess. Finally, I think we should note the imperative form. It is, of course, common sales practice to use the imperative (Don’t spend too much on car insurance!), but might not the imperative here signal an actual order, and, indeed, an order that the reader could not possibly comply with? Might it not be an ironic commentary on the limits of subjective freedom? For how does one prevent in advance one’s own embarrassment, where embarrassment constitutes an almost involuntary affective state? Might not the author of this message be commenting on the impossibility of controlling particular affects, these states that come from outside, that cannot be controlled by the subject that experiences or endures them? Isn’t this really a bit like saying “Don’t love her anymore!”  or “Don’t love him any more!” – the worst advice given to the moping teenager by his or her friends – but really an introduction to adulthood, as we learn the boundaries of the will: Don’t love her anymore, as if one could control through sheer will one’s fallingness, one’s loves? Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again! Oh, the reader thinks, would that I could turn it off!

3) RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves – Since I have never – to my knowledge – attended any discussion by Doctor Anita Graves, nor written any follow-up email regarding the Q&A that presumably followed such discussion, you can imagine my surprise when  I read this subject line, which takes the form of a response email to a follow-up to a Q&A session. Did I attend any such lecture? Did I send any such response to the Q&A? These questions struck panic into me when this subject line popped up in my inbox: could such a thing have happened without my remembering it? And so I examined the subject line more closely. In the first place, I’m struck by the form of responsiveness that’s imputed. First, there must have been some discussion. Following the discussion, there must have been a question and answer session. Following the question and answer session, the implied reader felt the need to either inquire or respond further. And following that response or inquiry, the writer of the subject line presumably provided yet another response. “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves” can thus be read as a dense sign of these much more extensive relationships of response and counter-response, information and courtesy. We can go further. The initial speaker, Doctor Anita Graves, retains her title, though whether she is a medical expert (who studies, say, the relative size of male sexual organs), or a professor of some kind is left to the implied reader’s memory. Certainly, a good argument can be made that Dr. Graves is, in fact, a medical doctor, since the use of the full term “Doctor” is much more common when referring to medical doctors than it is with regard to PhDs. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Anita Graves is a medical doctor. That adds a new layer to this richly woven subject line. The initial contact was with a professional, an expert. The expert is at the heart of the questioning; all the responsiveness and dialogue that follows is premised on the expert opinion of Doctor Anita Graves, the font of knowledge. In this small subject line we can detect the social structure of scientific, medical, and perhaps even expert discourse as a whole: the expert speaks, then allows additional clarifying questions; the implied reader seeks more, ever more truth from our expert, who gamely replies, as is the expert’s duty to both layperson and peer. Or perhaps I’m wr0ng about all of this! Perhaps Doctor Anita Graves has refused to do a Q&A in her pending lecture, absolutely refused to take questions from these jerks, and has stated so in no uncertain terms, and the administrator insisted that Q&A was a condition of the stipend, as follows: “Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…is a condition of the stipend!” Using her whole name and title thusly spelled out – the email equivalent of your mother calling you by your full given, middle, and last name when she catches you outside writing in the wet cement or catching a drag from a cigarette, and all your little hoodrat friends take off running because they know you’re so fucking busted when the full on name comes out. Doctor Anita Graves! Is that you writing in that cement there! Get in here this instant! And then this email, Doctor Anita Graves’ response to the completely inappropriate tone of the administrator’s admonishment, something like “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…It may be a condition of the stipend, but you can take your stipend, your lecture, and your fucking Q&A and shove it! I will not – NOT – be questioned by the likes of, etc. Yrs, Anita Emily Graves, MD”

So, yes, I had to be one of the numerous jackasses who felt the need to comment on how cold it is in my Facebook status. Sue me. It’s unusual. Still, mentioning that it’s like, really friggin’ cold is about as interesting as recounting the plot of a sitcom you saw last night, or telling detailed stories about the goings-on in the life of your cat. So now I will add more.

1. Clothing – I’m always amused by the outfits people wear when the forecast says it will be 25 below zero with the windchill. It’s like any thought of aesthetics goes out the window as you tend toward a particular limit, and everything goes super-functional very quickly. The major effect, as I see it, is that everybody ends up having to turn their whole bodies in order to look to the right and left, because the scarf-hood combinations end up acting like blinders. It leads to an odd sort of visual in a major city, because everyone’s gait is slowed, and you get these almost robotic movements, as if the population has itself slowed down like molecules. As for me, it’s not like I’m wearing she‘s yoga pants under my jeans or anything like that. Oh, wait. It is like that.
2. Clothing, Part 2 – Thus far, I haven’t encountered any of those total assclowns who wear shorts on the coldest day of the year in order to show you how they’ve mastered the physical environment. This particular brand of imbecile was extremely common when I was in college, but it may be a localized Northeast sort of practice. And suddenly, rumors of the “more practically minded” Midwesterners start to make sense.
3. Frosty – How is it that I have a frozen windshield on the inside of my car? Can any science heads help me with this? My hypothesis is as follows: the snow that has fallen or been footshovelled into the car evaporates somewhat, but then immediately freezes when it comes into contact with the glass. She’s hypothesis was as follows: a) You’re wrong, and b) It must have something to do with the temperature. Well, no shit. On both points. I suppose it will remain a mystery.
4. Icicles – Giant, huge, incredible icicles. Eight, ten, fourteen feet long. Clustered in massive packs.

So, wasn’t this fascinating? Oh, by the way, you should have seen what Willy the Cat did the other day. It was hilarious…

I guess I’ve been motivated to say all this for a while, but the real spur was an article I read the other day that tries to navigate a course for the future of usability studies, “User-Centered Technology in Participatory Culture: Two Decades ‘Beyond a Narrow Conception of Usability Studies,’” by Robert R. Johnson, Michael Salvo, and Meredith Zoetewey. The real exigence for the article seems to be the sort of thing that almost always gets ink these days: positioning professional technical communicators as a necessary part of technology design processes. This is an old story by now. You can’t read the technical writing literature for a day without coming across the deep anxiety about the the effects of disintermediation on the technical communicator role. Because this role has been so classically tied to a position of intermediary (between scientific experts and a lay public), its collapse in post-Fordist economies has sent everybody even faintly associated with the discipline into frantic redefinition mode. The problem, to state it quickly, is that in disciplinary societies (that is, Fordist-Taylorist economies) that maintained strict differentiation of functions (which is to say, a division of and within manual and mental labor, combined with a division of production and consumption), the technical communicator actually played a significant role, because the functional divisions produced distinctions in knowledge and capacities, and thus required the labor of an intermediary. As the partitions and divisions of the old disciplinary apparatuses start to fall apart, along with the temporal rhythms of the production process, these distinctions no longer hold. Not only is technical knowledge dispersed over a wide swath of the lay public (as every meth lab in Montana will readily attest to), but the experts and laypeople are often better at writing for and interacting with each other than the supposed intermediaries.

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Things muttered under my breath as I drove the eight blocks to pick up babygirl from daycare:

• What the?
• Oh, yeah, right in my way. Nice.
• This guy’s gonna get hit.
• Could you be shoveling any more in the street?
• Nice move, douche.

No complex interior monologue accompanies any of this, I should add. Just my average everyday hostility to people who aren’t behaving precisely in accordance with my needs. So I pulled into the spot at the daycare and thought to myself, “Hmm, maybe I’m really not a nice person.”

Two of the most perfectly crafted rock/pop songs of the 1980′s, one now a staple on NPR Market Place, the other virtually forgotten outside a rather odd collection of hardcore fans. But still. I was in my favorite bar in Queens over the holidays, and I told my brother that New Order’s “Ceremony” was one of my picks for most brilliant rock songs ever recorded. He made the usual face people make when you say something preposterous. But still. Of course, it was initially written when New Order was still Joy Division and Ian Curtis hadn’t yet fashioned himself a noose, but the New Order version – their first single release – is far better. I read somewhere that Bernard Sumner was still taking voice lessons at the time, learning how to breath while singing, a point that I didn’t know whether to take as mischievously ironic given the former lead singer’s fate. But you can hear the halting ineptitude of it, which is really what makes it perfect. The Ceremony video appearing here, too, some amateur hour film student job, chosen because only slightly better than the other option, the heartwarmingly despicable Kirsten Dunst vehicle Marie Antoinette, the 80′s party girl soundtrack of which was ostensibly meant to signify something: I’ll take cheap film school sentimentality of the (post)industrial structure crashing into the organic over that any day. The second is a favorite of mine that I’m almost embarrassed by, and I think the black screen YouTube is just about right. It’s a radio song, 1987 or thereabouts, written by Stephen Duffy, perhaps the most exquisite craftsmen of the 80′s English rock/pop song, just torn up by class ennui and joyful about it. I thought about it recently after seeing a flyer for a “poetry night commemorating the inauguration of Barack Obama.” Despite my open support of Obama since I announced to my students in October of 2004 that he would be President “one day” (we read his convention speech in honors comp two days after he delivered it – I wonder if they remember…), the flyer made me recoil a bit, left a bad taste, and all that. Certainly, I’m not “opposed” (as if one could be!) of the admixture of poetry and politics, but I do raise an eyebrow at poetry “celebrating” any fixture of the State – Obama or not. By all means, I wish him well in his job – and the notion of McCain/Palin was just too grisly to contemplate. And breakthroughs in something like a collective consciousness are of course wonderful. Yes. But poetry celebrating the elevation to Power? It’s unseemly. And so I was brought back to the lines Duffy used to capture the Event of working class England in shambles, destroyed by the Tory ascension, sure, but far more by a kind of global enthusiasm. It need not go the same way, but this is how many people that I feel far more comfortable with usually experience these “dramatic” social changes:

We’ll face this new England
Like we always have
In a fury of denial
We’ll go out dancing on the tiles
Help me down, but don’t take me back…

That’s perfect to me. Unproductive life, as the sociologist Michel Maffesoli might call it. But here we are now with Reaganism and Thatcherism in smithereens, their underlying economic philosophies exposed as fraud and sham (never once and for all, of course: it can always get worse). But the global enthusiasm lingers, even if mixed with dread. (And we know there was dread then, too. Perhaps the best scene in 24-Hour Party People has Ian Curtis dead-panning the lyrics of Transmission to a bunch of boinking skinheads, as the news of capitalist crisis – unemployment, war, oil shortage – gets spliced into the act; the Joy Division/New Order solution to the Thatcherite darkness was, moreover, much the same as Duffy’s: “we would have a fine time living in the night…so dance dance dance dance dance to the radio.” This response is not without cultural consequences: the dim outlines of a coming techno can be heard in Stephen Morris’ frenetic high hat, even then, the trip from Warsaw to Blue Monday as bound up in the history of neoliberalism as in the technology of the drum machine). So the global enthusiasm lingers, in any case: We’ll face this new America, like we always have, in a fury of denial, we’ll go out dancing on the tiles…

Just finished Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times. Youch. The book reads like an extended rant by somebody who’s kept it all bottled up, where “it” is the general intellectual and cultural attitude in France (and more generally) since the 1980′s. Centered primarily on (normalized) psychology, it turns into a long polemic against the nouvelle philosophie, and a corresponding defense of the philosophers who “heroically” demolished the “norm” (Canguilhem, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida). All very interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, but the tone was really the knife-twist. You don’t often see stuff like the following snippet at the conferences or in the journals, but maybe that’s a bad thing. In this localized rant, she’s beating up on James Miller’s (truly asinine where not totally unreadable) book on Foucault:

According to Miller, Foucault’s father so humiliated him by forcing him to watch an amputation that Foucault lost his virility and remained fascinated all his life by the opening up of cadavers and the sight of torture. Likewise the sight of the mattress on which the sequestered woman of Poitiers had lain had given him a taste for enclosed spaces, labyrinths, and incarceration. As for his feelings of jealousy toward the Jewish students exterminated by the Nazis, it lay, according to Miller, at the root of Foucault’s conviction that fascism had to be opposed, not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a power that determines, without our knowing it, our most routine actions. In any case, these three repressed traumatic experiences guided Foucault, on Miller’s showing, down the tortuous pathways of a death cult – the sole explanation of his suicidal passion and his “desire” to contract AIDS.

One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively Freudian interpretation of the work and life of Michel Foucault, resting on nothing but extravagant hypotheses and reaching the most banal conclusion possible: Every book originates in the lived experience of its author. (90)

I don’t know about you, but I want to one day be able to say “One is left speechless at the stupidity of this putatively…” Burn.

So I taught my first classes in downtown Chicago (the Loop, for those of you who don’t know the town) this morning, and it was a weird feeling. It wasn’t strange being in the middle of a major financial district, since I worked almost exclusively in major financial districts (in New York, and in San Francisco) for all my non-academic jobs, with the exception of a stint in various places in Albany. But it was strange to have an academic job and walk out of your classroom into the middle of Jackson and Wabash, with the El running overhead and all the bustle. I guess I’ve attached a feeling of place to those two parts of my working life: the academic being associated with some isolated Giant University Town, and the financial being associated with the urban center. Up until this quarter, all my classes have been located at the slightly more urban campus, but that one is still somewhat divided from the city space simply through concentration; it’s still a campus, in other words. But in the Loop, you’re right in the middle of the city, and nothing divides you from any other worker in that city. (Needless to say, this mirrors the classic division of practical and theoretical knowledge that has reigned more or less since Aristotle, so it probably wasn’t too hard to simply transpose such a dominant set of categories on to geographical coordinates, even unconsciously). But these came crashing together in a strange and pleasant way today.

By the way, does anybody else out there get “First Day of Class Sore Throat?” I guess I don’t really project-talk so much in the off-season, and then two classes of syllabus/policies/assignments which involves mostly me yapping always leaves my throat sore. Ouchies.

This week I read three books that were originally published some time ago, and republished recently. All were strong and interesting. As follows:

1) Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 2: Disorientation – The follow-up to Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, T&T2 came out in France in 1996, and only became available in translation (through Stanford UP) in November. It is a difficult book – made more difficult because my background in Husserl is not as complete as it should be – but certainly rewarding. In T&T1, Stiegler argues for a coevolution of technology and the human, with more emphasis on the autonomous evolution of technical systems. While this would seem like a familiar argument, Stiegler is really offering a challenge to a Heideggerian version of autonomous technology (which he’s careful not to reduce to a caricature, as is so common) by refusing an easy distinction between an authentic relation to futurity and a merely technical one (i.e., mathesis, creation of a standing reserve, etc.). Because anticipation and technics are mutually constitutive, he can locate something like being-towards-death already in the origin of the technical relationship. T&T2 expands on this notion with further consequences. Since there will likely be more detailed discussions of T&T2 appearing here later, I’ll save some of my comments for then.

2) Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology, and the Bourgeois Project – More Negri reading is always fun, and this book on Descartes really shows the method at work. Originally published in 1970, it was translated fairly recently (2007) as part of Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. If you’ve read The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, you would already have a sense of how Negri goes about his work here, reading the development of Descartes philosophical corpus as a concrete response to the political struggles of his period. Specifically, Negri argues that Descartes is involved in a project to save the political fortunes of an emerging bourgeois class that had recently suffered the near total defeat of Renaissance humanism, and faced the return of authoritarianism both in the sciences (Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, qualitas, argumentum ex verbo, and all the other enemies of the emerging modern sciences) and at the level of the state (monarchy, absolutism, etc.). Negri demonstrates Descartes construction of a “reasonable ideology” which sought to mitigate the “defeat” of humanism (defeat is the key word in the study, and would probably be the biggest word on the map if Political Descartes were subjected to a Wordle-ization), which is really the emerging value of the bourgeois as a class, by founding a relationship between the individual and knowledge/action that would guarantee the bourgeois project as it struggled against both the (monarchical) state  and the nascent power of the proletariat. A couple of points of interest. First, despite the rift with the typical PCI theoretical frame (in Gramscianism), Negri’s argument really relies on specific Gramscian concepts. Specifically, because Descartes entire mature philosophical work responds to the defeat of the humanist revolution, Negri deploys the idea of a form of struggle that was really formulated directly by Gramsci, and that colored the responses of the Italian Communist Party to the post-war period:

Along with Galileo, the malin sweeps away the revolutionary illusion, the humanist hope. Descartes takes note of all this, accepting the setback but refusing to abandon hope. One must live. Once the revolution is over, the war of position begins (155).

Given that Negri almost compulsively emphasizes that he virtually ignored Gramsci, and given that the volume was written through the height of student movement and labor struggles of 1968-1969, this emergence of Gramscianism at the heart of Negri’s thesis is remarkable indeed. Second, the translators introduction notes the recent emergence of Descartes as a touchstone for critical responses (clustering, of course, around Zizek and Badiou). Negri’s postscript for the English edition studiously ignores these developments (though Zizek, for one, wastes no time beating up on Negri any opportunity he can, as in, humorously as always, In Defense of Lost Causes). But it should be said that Negri anticipates the defense of Descartes in some ways (as constructing some irretrievable remainder of subjectivity that cannot be “accessed” by the power of social systems): “only thought unconditionally qualifies my generic existence and posits it in its autonomy prior to any concretization that, historically or materially, may be impressed upon it, and may have to be accepted” (216). If so-called “postmodern” attacks on Descartes are decried as ideology because they strip even this last vestige of resistance to social power, Negri seems to be suggesting here that it was already thus for Descartes, albeit in a context where a sovereign rather than capitalist power stalked the landscape with totalitarian claws. Score one for Negri, nearly 40 years before the argument. All this is to say, finally, Political Descartes may be most interesting to students of rhetoric because it really serves to ground the rhetorical nature of Descartes’ work, and – hopefully – at least asks us to move beyond caricatured versions of the “Cartesian subject” that have circulated for years in a fairly weak rhetorical theoretical discourse, and that nobody in philosophy has taken seriously for quite some time.

3) William M. Tuttle’s Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 – Finally able to look away from the mostly pitiable work on free and open source software and devote at least some time to Chicago history, I breezed through this book last night and this morning, thereby finally getting some non-computer history fix.  (OK, not really true…I read Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold and Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago when I was traveling back to Giant State University Town recently, but that’s just guilty pleasure true crime schlock). Tuttle’s study initially appeared in 1970, but was republished by Illinois University Press in 1996. The book does a great job of situating the race riots that broke out in July of 1919, first describing the riot itself, then drawing out its causes in labor disputes, housing shortages, political differences, and the development of a militant consciousness among African Americans, mostly deriving from the increasing aggressiveness of white racism, the migration into the northern cities, and the effects of World War I. Indeed, Tuttle’s description of African American armed resistance to marauding white mobs in the Black Belt is really eye-opening. Just a terrific study. Tuttle’s chapter on labor disputes in Chicago leading up to the riots is a classic in source-based argumentation, and utterly persuasive. Now, Tuttle was of course also responding to the wave of riots that gripped urban America in the 1960′s (and it was useful to read next to Negri’s own 1970 offering for this reason), and he develops an interesting comparative thesis. Whereas the race riots of the early 20th century saw direct confrontation between races, the riots of the post World War 2 era were largely symbolic (i.e., attacking the store rather than the lynchmob) or mediated through the state apparatus (i.e., confrontation between minority rioters and police forces as representatives of the majoritarian state, rather than confrontation between opposed racially determined combatants). This is an interesting point that could be further pursued, but certainly seems to be borne out by intuition.

Next up in my Chicago reading? Dominic Pacyga’s Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side 1880-1922. Will report when I get through that one. When I read a book or two of dense philosophy, these history books become almost like mass market paperback pleasure reading, though they are just incredibly fascinating. I’ve realized that I have virtually no mental image and only a faint awareness of the geography of the South Side,  despite the fact that I’ve lived in Chicago now for almost a year and a half. Which is fuckedf up, of course, but probably a testament to the way this town has developed.