Seven Red

I’m coining it! I did a Google search for “contripreneur,” and got this:

Bupkiss. So it’s mine. As you know, I intensely dislike the term “prosumer,” largely because I think it obscures more than it reveals. The actual term for the activity supposedly taken up by the prosumer should be, in my view, the “contripreneur,” an admittedly tongue-in-cheek combination of the contributor and the entrepreneur. (I don’t think it’s any more etymologically senseless than “prosumer,” in any case). And I want to use it to describe a whole set of activities, ranging from micro-finance and the kind of entrepreneurial charity work described recently by Nicholas Kristoff, the more modest contripreneurial activities, like designing tee shirts for Threadless to uploading YouTube videos and the like. Put another way, I want the term to have a broader extension than the “prosumer” because I’m attempting to link prosumer activities to a series of other activities, including, I should note, the way we contribute to our retirement plans and the like, which are mostly now “defined contribution plans” as opposed to the defined benefits plans of the old economy. But for now, I’ll just be staking that information claim, and we’ll see how fast Google’s little bots find my frequent mention of the contripreneur in this blog post titled The Contripreneur. Did I mention the contripreneur?

Apart from assaying my Googlexistence, I’m going to use this term as a jumping off point for getting back into the whole discussion of contribution that I brought up in the Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post (which has, oddly enough, become a favorite of Israeli spammers), and continued in a few other posts. And I’ll try to do that through several readings of Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, which posits a “Contribution Economy” as an escape route from the crisis of contemporary capital. So, more on Stiegler as I get to it.

Here’s one from American Slang, which will probably have to compete for my top ten records of the year. (Isn’t December the time for Top Tens?). The Gaslight Anthem is, to my mind, this really interesting phenomenon, since their overriding theme seems to be the overt nostalgia for some working class youth, but it meshes perfectly with nostalgia for something like a collapsing industrial society. Indeed, Arcade Fire talks the talk on this, but The Gaslight Anthem really works it in formally, a kind of yearning for Springsteen’s 70′s, and their links with Springsteen are, of course, well-known by now (I think there’s probably something wrong with people who don’t like “The ’59 Sound” the first time they hear it). I guess the whole nostalgia thing is strange cuz these dudes are in their twenties.

Digression: This reminds me that I really want to pick up Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 70′s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I was tempted to just buy and read the other day (along with Francois Dosse’s mammoth biography of Deleuze and Guattari – I really liked Dosse’s History of Structuralism). Then I thought, why buy either of these when certain blog readers might be agonizing again over what in the world to get me for Christmas, and not wanting me to look at the book they’ve presented me, only to have me say “You really have no idea what I do, right?” See? I make things easy.

Anyway, here’s “Orphans” from American Slang, followed by “Boxer” at Bonnaroo

I like this, from our friends at Loungerati:

Since reading about the 500 year anniversary of DOM Benedictine contest last year, I have been tinkering with my own recipe that honors the liqueur but also tips the trilby to the iconic Italian macchina, the Fiat Cinquecento (“500″ in Italian). In other words, DOM meets MOD, a drink that you could have in Torino or West London or Brooklyn. May I introduce a delicious new aperitivo!

Head over to Loungerati to get more on this, including the recipe for The Cinquecento. Just as a note, she and I always make fun of the Fiat Cinquecento. We were listening to NPR one day, and it must have been the 50th anniversary  of the iconic car, because they had some guy on with a thick Italian accent who said something like, “You know, many people in Italy were told that they were conceived in a Fiat Cinquecento.” Wink wink. Hahaha, said the otherwise serious NPR journalist lady, the implication being Oh those crazy Italians with the sexy and the passion! Needless to say, she and I cracked up, since this remains the way “Italy” functions in the American imaginary, even on Marketplace. So now, whenever we see a commercial or news report that draws on the same trope (“Italians are soooo passionate”), we immediately break into Italian accents and say “Did you know, non per niente, that I wuza – how you say – conceived with the bang bang in a Fiat Cinquecento, which izza the funny, yes?, because it is such a smallah car!”

Just as a side note, one could easily index the production of the Fiat Cinquecento to the whole of postwar economic development – and corresponding labor struggle – in Italy. It was through the Cinquecento that the Mirafiore Fiat plant expanded into its giant form; it would become one of the primary sites (along with the Pirelli rubber works in Milan) of the labor uprisings of 1968 (at Pirelli, especially), the Hot Autumn of 1969 (with the occupation of Mirafiore), and the culmination of that cycle in 1973-74.  (Production of the Cinquecento shifted away from Mirafiore in the mid-1960′s, in a deal with Pirelli, Fiat, and Bianchi/Autobianchi). We also see in the production of the Cinquecento the problem of the rapid rise in output in the factories (indeed, the 1957, 1960, and 1965 numbers for the Cinquecento show something like an 80 degree curve, upward), which required the mass migration of southern workers to the industrial valleys of the north, produced the mid-level “pink collar” class of technical workers that would become crucial for autonomist arguments against traditional union structures, and pointed up the problems of intensified labor exploitation together with stagnating wages, the very conditions that made the CGIL accomodationism that much more dramatic. Certainly, there were other industries that shifted the composition of the Italian working class during this period (the development of the massive petrochemical plants in Porto Marghera industrial corridor, for instance), but it would be hard not to see the development and popularity of the Fiat Cinquecento (especially during the 1960′s) as contributing directly to the transformation of the Italian labor movement in the 1960′s and 70′s, which of course comes to us today through people like Negri (Potere Operaio’s role in the Mirafiore strikes of 1973 are especially important for understanding this trajectory). I guess it’s more fun to say “My mama said she makuh the bang bang in the Cinquecento!”

So, to the Cinquecento. I’ll ask Loungerati’s cocktail specialist to make me one when we get back east, and I know what I’ll be drinking to.

The hippies won’t come back, you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!
Dead Kennedys, California Über Alles

Some quick reviews. In my (very little) off-time this summer I managed to pick through a few non-work books, including a little bout of California noir in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere and, of course, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Reading the two more or less together in the space of a week made for both a nice contrast and a nice focus on the genre, though trying to peg Pynchon on genre is always going to be a little wonky. I liked The Big Nowhere, and I always find Ellroy just eminently readable. There’s also something deeply attractive about the counterfactual method that runs throughout Ellroy’s books: pick a hazy actual historical crime and build an utterly corrupt and twisted explanation for it, walking some interesting characters through the process. In The Black Dahlia, obviously, it’s the Elizabeth Short case. In The Big Nowhere, it’s the Sleepy Lagoon case. I’m rarely surprised by such books, but I was surprised by the character of Danny Upshaw, and I think Ellroy handles the character really well.

Pynchon is also focused on a real California crime, though he has no interest in offering alternative theories. Inherent Vice is set in 1970, and what a difference twenty years makes from Ellroy’s Los Angeles. I have to believe that Pynchon and his publisher were playing a bit of a joke by releasing Inherent Vice on August 4 (it’s beach reading!), since the various reviews would inevitably appear in the same newspapers that were commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders (August 8 and 9), and these events permeate the novel like a sinister background, some creepy crawly hum that plays behind the text only to break through here and there, with Pynchon’s protagonist, surfer-hippie detective Doc Sportello, professing a crush on Leslie Van Houten and teasing his homicide detective rival, Bigfoot Bjornsen, for not having been “up on Cielo Drive” with the rest of them. But this is really par for the course for Pynchon – in Gravity’s Rainbow, in Vineland certainly, in Inherent Vice, and in (I might have to argue another time) Against the Day – always with an eye toward the collapse of the 60’s counterculture, the emergence of a control society, and he manages to do it in an oddly non-nostalgic way. Something flashed and was gone, and while Pynchon’s going to remain faithful to that event (like Dick with Valis), he’s always working through the process of its disappearance, how fear – dread even – inundates an entire culture and becomes its engine. Classic noir, and I think Ellroy is just a master at this, certainly runs on shady networks, but its always a question of struggle, not fear. And if that’s the switch, there’s no better place to go than Los Angeles in 1970, as the fear generated in early August of the previous year became a national spectacle, a lesson in the new form of life.

One gets the sense reading Inherent Vice that Doc Sportello is telling the tale himself, maybe in the present. The narrator slips into Sportello-like verbal tics, like ending sentences with “and so forth,” and you don’t get the long, contemplative sentences that appear in Gravity’s Rainbow or Against the Day – except at the end, the last few paragraphs (which sketch, incidentally, as beautiful a set of images as you see in any Pynchon). The primary narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow never slips into Slothropisms, like using the word “that” before a place name (that Berlin, that London, and – hilariously – that the Hague), but in Inherent Vice you get just that, and so forth. But if fear is the engine, you get laughter and detachment as the counterforce. Inherent Vice is an incredibly funny book, maybe in the way Vineland sought to be funny, or in the way Gravity’s Rainbow (and, for my money, Mason & Dixon) actually was. The big joke that all the reviews note is that the detective is a stoner who forgets pretty much what he’s doing repeatedly throughout the book, but that’s the detachment side. Far more interesting is that the narrator seems to mostly remember the funny parts, even as the fear is pumped out by the gallon.

So, continuing on in our long neglected series on the so-called Italian Ideology, I want to look at Paolo Virno’s discussion of the joke in Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Behind Negri, Virno is probably the closest of the old autonomist movement thinkers in terms of his recent publication in English speaking contexts. Several of his early pieces appear, of course, in the Autonomia volume originally published in 1982, but Michael Hardt’s influence in moving contemporary Italian thought into English translation has been massive. Virno co-edited, with Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy, which appeared in 1996, and Virno’s subsequent little volume, A Grammar of the Multitude was at least widely remarked on when it appeared in 2004. Last summer, in addition to Marazzi’s Capital and Language, Semiotext(e) published Multitude: Between…, not to be confused with Hardt and Negri’s Multitude (the third volume of Hardt and Negri’s series, called Commonwealth, is due in October). So, obviously, Virno has been working on this concept of multitude as the form of the political, as well as a set of related concepts also addressed in Negri, like the common and kairos, so he could therefore be said to supplement the more popular work in the Empire line. Indeed, this is precisely how Virno’s work has functioned even among those clearly in tune with the Negri’s arguments (like Ronald Greene, for instance).

I’d suggest, however, that Virno is far more grounded in rhetorical and linguistic theory than Negri, which certainly makes the relative lack of interest in his work among American rhetoricians a little mystifying. The 1990’s-style tendency to hitch American rhetoric’s wagon to the latest European philosopher has been duly squelched of late by the neo-pragmatists, not to mention the monopolistic Burke industry. Stars and stripes forever. That’s probably a good thing, even if the baby often goes out with the eau-de-toilette. But I think Multitude: Between… makes some interesting moves that at least deserve a closer look, that-side-of-the-pond provenance notwithstanding.

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For me, one of the more interesting papers published in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric – the proceedings of the 2008 RSA Conference – is Richard Glejzer and Michael Bernard-Donals’ “Synecdoche as Figure of the Holocaust,” largely because it dovetails with Alan Liu’s recent collection of essays, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Both pieces zoom in on and seek to explain the rhetorical work of the detail in contemporary historical writing, so I think I’ll discuss them together here.

Glejzer and Bernard-Donals are really starting, theoretically, with the problem of figuration in historical writing, building off the work of Hayden White, and his four tropes through which historians “structure” history (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony). At issue for Glejzer and Bernard-Donals is, first, which of these figures dominates Holocaust history, and, second, more expansively, what the dominant figure tells us about the historical event and our understanding of it. Specifically, the authors identify a purportedly metonymic method in Holocaust history writing that has dominated the field “since Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews” (really, the classic in the field, even 50 years after its first publication), and through the various memoirs and diaries and witnessings. The metonymic structure of these histories, the authors contend, proceeds by a detailed recitation of the “parts” that – both singly and through accumulation – points back to a whole as explanation or cause (220); you would presumably understand something of the Holocaust as some kind of substantive agent that produces the parts (the particular detail) as patient of that agent. But Glejzer and Bernard-Donals find something very different in Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million. While the memoir would seem, on its surface, to be structured according to the same metonymic logic of historical figuration, it actually, Glejzer and Bernard-Donals argue, operates by synecdoche. If metonymy points back to a whole as cause, synecdoche functions rather as a “part-for-part substitution, in which the associative relation implies a whole rather than expresses it as part of the substitutive relation” (220). It points back to the “hole” rather than the “whole” of the historical event, some essential caesura or excess that, because it is the real – escapes the method of detail, and any method of telling, for that matter.

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Whew. That was a week of reading like comps. When I was reading for comps, I tended to measure my progress – at least apart from the giant stacks of notes – on raw pages; if I plowed through 1000-1500 pages in a week, that was good, while 600 was at the low end (i.e., Derrida). Of course, you have to go back and conceptualize all that, but there is only so much time, and there’s so much to get through, so setting yourself page goals always seemed to reduce the despair before the massiveness of it all. So, this week, I plowed through about 1000 pages of Agamben, which I found now remarkably painless, and I did it while teaching the two classes (OK, granted, it was the last week, so the preps were cursory) and going to meetings, and grading and all that. I can see why faculty seems unimpressed when graduate students gripe about their workload, in any case. But this would have been a pretty good week during comps, especially if you throw a few articles into the mix:

Now, I had read some Agamben before, both collections, and a couple of books: Homo Sacer and The Open (both of which I reread this week). In fact, a funny story about The Open. I read it for a reading group in graduate school, and then some months later lent it to the department chair for some reason. Probably more than a year went by, and then it was time for me to leave SC for Chicago. Before I left, the department chair saw me in the hallway and said “Oh, let me return your book.” Huh, I thought. What book? I followed him into his office and he handed me The Open, to which I replied “I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.” I had no memory of ever seeing this book before in my life. Very diplomatically, he pretended to be unsure, but encouraged me to look through it. I opened up the book to see detailed margin notes in my handwriting throughout. “Huh,” I said, “I guess it is mine.” Well, maybe that’s what you get when you’re plowing through a thousand pages a week.

When you don’t completely forget that you’ve read something, the comps style gets you – if it’s not your main area – some fakeable sense of the concepts (sovereign exception, naked or bare life, the remnant, potentiality, space of indistinction between law and life, language and life, human and inhuman, etc.) and a vague sense of the conversations (with Aristotle on potential, with Schmitt on law/politics, with Benjamin on messianic time, with Heidegger on the ontological difference, with Arendt and Foucault – especially with Foucault – on biopower). And that’s about what I got when I read a little of Agamben’s stuff last time. I remember being annoyed at the time by the intro to Homo Sacer in its portrayal of Foucault’s work, which I still think is off the mark, but certainly worth consideration rather than annoyance. I say you, in any case, when I should say me. Maybe some people can integrate the conceptual system across the board when they’re plowing through stuff, but I can’t. I usually just got some slogans, which is sufficient to the task, and probably not completely worthless, either. But this second reading during the last week gave me a more systematic look at the way these concepts play off each other and connect, maybe call it slogan-plus, so I want to take some of that up in the coming weeks. In a sense, this is the continuation of my long-neglected series here on the so-called “Italian ideology,” and I think that Agamben – by not quite being included (the included exclusion? the excluded inclusion?) in the Autonomist tradition – does shed some light on what’s going on with some of the other stuff I’ve discussed (Negri, Virno, Esposito), especially, as I said, when it comes to biopower, and really, the analysis of power more generally. I still have Profanations, the St. Paul book (how Agamben cashes out his early work on kairos from Infancy and History is the real target here), Potentialities, and the latest, What is an Apparatus?, to get through, but I’ll probably be responding here as I go, in the new series … Blogamben (it’s true…we’re so lame).

I was coming home on the train today, re-reading Paul Willis’ classic study and analysis Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. I first read the book somewhat badly as an undergraduate, and then again maybe my second semester in graduate school. In the graduate school version, I remember reading Willis, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress all together, probably all in the same week. Willis’ significantly gloomier version of things just resonated with me more than the others, probably because his ethnography bore significant resemblance to my own memories of high school, though Willis’ study takes place in early 1970′s industrial England. In any case, I’m re-reading the book for a project I’m working on, and it’s as good and funny and cogent as I remember, and maybe as gloomy. This time I actually bought a used copy.

So I get on the train, and I’m surrounded by a bunch of young CTA workers who are clowning around and generally trying to get through their day. They’re standing around cracking on each other, telling each other in exaggerated voices that they’re “blocking the patrons” with their equipment. They have canvas bags filled with florescent orange flags and various tools.

“Get out the way! Can’t you see that lady’s tryin’ to get off the train!”

“You need to move, young man! Those reserved for senior citizens. Patrons.” They’re punching each other, laughing.

Then two more get on at Southport station, and these guys are the real clowns.

“Hey,” says the guy sitting next to me, playing the boss, to one of the new arrivals, “I know you weren’t posted to Southport, so I don’t know how you gettin’ on there.”

“Oh,” says one of the new guys, “I was over at Wrigley.” They all laugh.

“Oh, OK,” says the Boss. “At Wrigley. Drinkin’, too, prolly.”

“Oh, no sir. I’m a dedicated employee. I would never be off drinking at Wrigley when the CTA needs me. But I shouldn’t uh had that sixth.” They all laugh.

“Mmmm hmmm,” says the Boss.

It goes on like this for some time, until I’m one of the few left on the train with these guys. They’re all loud and carrying on. Then, suddenly, the Boss says, very officially, “Will y’all quiet down? Can’t you see this gentleman here is reading?” That would be me. This gentleman.

“Oh, he’s studyin’ for a test! Stop messin’ him up!”

“You gonna quiz him?”

I look up and smile. Alright. You got me. I get it.

“He fail that quiz he gonna end up workin’ the CTA,” says one of the clowns. “You better let him read.”

They’re all laughing their asses off. I’m smiling. OK, guys. I get it.

Now, stuff that’s ironic. I was reading the following paragraph as all this was going on:

Some of the non-conformist group in the grammar school are, in fact, from working class families. Despite even their origins and anti-school attitude, the lack of a dominant working class ethos within their school culture profoundly separates their experience from ‘the lads.’ It can also lead to artificial attempts to demonstrate solidarity on the street and with street contacts. That the working class cultural forms of school opposition are creative, specific, borne and reproduced by particular individuals and groups from afresh and in particular contexts – though always within a class mode – is shown by the cultural awkwardness and separation of such lads. The lack of the collective school based and generated form of the class culture, even despite a working class background and an inclination to oppositional values, considerably weakens their working class identity (58).

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you get it.

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.

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.