Seven Red

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.

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