The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Perverts Guide to Ideology from Phyo Win Latt on Vimeo.

European (Union) Nihilism by Santiago Zabala & Gianni Vattimo

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/european-union-nihilism

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND MARTIN HEIDEGGER continue to be controversial political figures in European culture. But this should not hold us back from singling out the aspects of their thought that allow for an emancipation from nihilism — the same nihilism that, in our view, affects European politics today. Many continue to consider Nietzsche a precursor of Nazism; in Heidegger’s case, more evidence is now available of his indisputable involvement with the anti-Semitic regime in the 1930s. Still, both thinkers elucidated not only European nihilism but also its consequences. This is the philosophical background of Syriza’s recent election in Greece, the first representative of an anti-austerity party to obtain power within the European Union. This election should not only be conceived of as a political event, but also as a response to the European Union’s latent nihilism.

Heidegger, in his writings on Nietzsche in the 1950s, defined nihilism as the process in the course of which “there is nothing to Being itself.” He was not only thinking of the forgetting of Being (existence) in favor of beings (objects), but also of the future of Europe. And this future, as we have since been able to see, has turned out to be a metaphysical organization of society in which science and power reciprocally sustain themselves through technology Before we get to nihilism, then, a quick word about metaphysics.

According to Heidegger, thought is metaphysical when it tries to determine Being as presence, that is, as a simple set of descriptions of the present state of affairs, thus automatically privileging terms of temporal, spatial, and unified presentness. This is why Heidegger believed that “insofar as the pure relationship of the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relationship, the present that is present to itself becomes the measure for all beingness.” Even though these sets of measurable descriptions took diverse approaches throughout the history of philosophy (from Aristotle’s motionless true substances, to Kant's transcendental conditions of experience, to John Searle’s ontology of social functions), philosophers were always directed to consider Being as a motionless, nonhistorical, and geometric object or fact. Truth, in this form, became a correspondence that adapts or submits to Being’s descriptions; thought dissolves itself into a science, that is, into the global organization of all beings within a predictable structure of causes and effects. In the 1950s, when Heidegger stated in his course What is Called Thinking? that “science does not think,” he was not simply denigrating it, but rather pointing out that it functions exclusively within causes and effects previously established. Now, if science today has become an instrument of oppression, it’s not simply because its technicians pose as respected officers who organize Europe’s political, economical, and cultural life, but also for metaphysical reasons, because Being has been forgotten, discharged, and annihilated. This is probably why Heidegger was able to predict already back then that “Europe will one day be a single bureau, and those who ‘work together’ will be the employees of their own bureaucracy.” This bureaucracy has become the essence of EU measures, or better, science in Heidegger’s terms.

And here is where we return to nihilism. Syriza’s victory in Greece’s recent elections represents more than the emerging possibility of the weak redeeming themselves from the imposed austerity measures of the European Union. It also signals a breaking away from European (Union) nihilism. Arthur C. Danto explained that nihilism represented for Nietzsche “a thoroughly disillusioned conception of a world which is as hostile to human aspirations as he could imagine it to be. It is hostile, not because it, or anything other than us, has goals of its own, but because it is utterly indifferent to what we either believe or hope.” Although philosophical nihilism has little to do with the term’s ordinary political connotations, the European Union nonetheless has instantiated it through measures imposed by technicians predominantly indifferent to the aspirations of Europeans.

Haven’t we reached the moment, as Nietzsche explains in The Will to Power, where “the highest values devaluate themselves”? Europeans, as the last elections and polls show, are increasingly disillusioned about their economic conditions and their leaders and have almost lost all faith in the idea of European unity. We believe that this disillusionment is not caused exclusively by the EU’s controlling corporate interests, or by Germany’s interest in maintaining the debt of Greece and other southern countries. Rather, it is the Europeans themselves who reflect back and realize the EU’s latent nihilism.

Perhaps the “logic of decadence” that Nietzsche uses to explain nihilism’s development, tracing it back to three essential causes, can also be related to this declining faith in the Union. According to Nietzsche, nihilism commences when a providential order is assigned to history. However, when it turns out this providential order does not to exist, it loses meaning. Second, nihilism arises when the world and its unfolding are conceived as a totality in which every part has its place in a systematic whole. In this case, it is not so much that this whole or system has become false; it has simply turned out to be unbearable for human existence because it neutralizes politics, finance, and culture through globalization. This is how we arrive at the final, extreme form of nihilism: the loss of faith in the metaphysically relevant world and in truth itself, at least as it is traditionally understood (as temporal, spatial, and unified presentness, as we explained earlier on).

That loss of illusions can signify either the absolute incapacity to will any more, or the joyous and creative recognition of the fact that there exists no order, truth, or stability outside the will itself. Nihilism derives precisely from having wished, at all costs, to find these exterior organizing principles. It can thus be both the incapacity to experience a meaningful existence and a practical way to escape from this decadence. The first aspect of nihilism, where “a decline and retreat of the spirit’s power” takes place, is considered “passive.” The second is defined as “active,” a “sign of the increased power of the spirit.” But if the power of the spirit exerts itself primarily by dissolving everything that demands consent as objective structure, eternal value, and fixed meaning, then saying “no” to this is arguably a sign of activity, that is, of active nihilism.

Who, then, is the active nihilist in Europe today? The ones who state the accusation, as Slavoj Žižek put it, that the “government in Greece is composed of a bunch of populist extremists who advocate ‘irrational’ and ‘irresponsible’ populist measures”? Or those who “struggle for an entire way of life, the resistance of a world threatened by rapid globalization or, rather, of a culture with its daily rituals and manners, which are threatened by post-historical commodification.” Regardless of the EU’s warnings and threats, the people of Greece have accepted this risk by voting and supporting a party determined to dissolve the objective, fixed meanings as determined by the EU — or, as Heidegger would call it, to contest a condition that has become metaphysical. Metaphysics is the condition where “the only emergency is the absence of emergency,” that is, “where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.” It is a form of passive nihilism. Greece, within the European Union, is considered an emergency, an alteration of the ongoing neutralization of politics. The active nihilism that Greece has endorsed is manifest not only in their minister of finance, Yanis Varoufakis, who has refused to engage with auditors from the Troika, but also in Alexis Tsipras’s role in promoting leftist anti-austerity politics throughout Europe. The emergency in Europe is not Syriza, but rather all those who submit “passively” to the Union’s flattening measures: its enforced absence of emergency.

In sum, the active nihilism or emergency that Syriza enacted by saying “no” to the Troika is an event that involves not only Greece but all of Europe. This might be the only possibility that allows Europe to wake up from the passive nihilism of its bureaucratic dream, which its governors (the commons, the council, and a substantial part of the Parliament) have imposed and wish to conserve. As Pope Francis recently said in his native Spanish, one must “hacer lio,” that is, generate non-violent disorder, disarray, or say “no” to the international capitalist establishments that are choking the European economies, and in particular those of the South. One must “make a mess.” 

This means being active European nihilists, the only ones who can confront the Union’s ongoing political, financial, and, most of all, spiritual decadence.

Divine violence in Ferguson

Violent protests like those in Ferguson happen more and more often. Are these merely irrational outbursts or symptoms of a new world order?

http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/slavoj-zizek/9774-slavoj-zizek-on-ferguson-and-violence

In August 2014, violent protests exploded in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot to death an unarmed black teenager suspected of robbery. For days, police tried to disperse mostly black protesters. Although the details of the accident are murky, the poor black majority of the town took it as yet another proof of the systematic police violence against them. In U.S. slums and ghettos, police effectively function more and more as a force of occupation, something akin to Israeli patrols entering the Palestinian territories on the West Bank; media were surprised to discover that even their guns are more and more U.S. Army arms. Even when police units try just to impose peace, distribute humanitarian help, or organize medical measures, their modus operandi is that of controlling a foreign population. “The Rolling Stone” magazine recently drew the conclusion that imposes itself after the Ferguson incident:

“Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country. Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law enforcement.”

In such a situation, when police are no longer perceived as the agent of law, of the legal order, but as just another violent social agent, protests against the predominant social order also tend to take a different turn: that of exploding “abstract negativity” – in short, raw, aimless violence. When, in his “Group Psychology”, Freud described the “negativity” of untying social ties (Thanatos as opposed to Eros, the force of the social link), he all too easily dismissed the manifestations of this untying as the fanaticism of the “spontaneous” crowd (as opposed to artificial crowds: the Church and the Army). Against Freud, we should retain the ambiguity of this movement of untying: it is a zero level that opens up the space for political intervention. In other words, this untying is the pre-political condition of politics, and, with regard to it, every political intervention proper already goes “one step too far”, committing itself to a new project (or Master-Signifier).

Do they not hit the innocent?

Today, this apparently abstract topic is relevant once again: the “untying” energy is largely monopolized by the New Right (the Tea Party movement in the U.S., where the Republican Party is increasingly split between Order and its Untying). However, here also, every fascism is a sign of failed revolution, and the only way to combat this Rightist untying will be for the Left to engage in its own untying – and there are already signs of it (the large demonstrations all around Europe in 2010, from Greece to France and the UK, where the student demonstrations against university fees unexpectedly turned violent). In asserting the threat of “abstract negativity” to the existing order as a permanent feature which can never be aufgehoben, Hegel is here more materialist than Marx. In his theory of war (and of madness), he is aware of the repetitive return of the “abstract negativity” which violently unbinds social links. Marx re-binds violence into the process out of which a New Order arises (violence as the “midwife” of a new society), while in Hegel, the unbinding remains non-sublated.

Are such “irrational” violent demonstrations with no concrete programmatic demands, sustained by just a vague call for justice, not today’s exemplary cases of what Walter Benjamin called “divine violence” (as opposed to “mythic violence”, i.e. the law-founding state violence)? They are, as Benjamin put it, means without ends, not part of a long-term strategy. The immediate counter-argument here is: but are such violent demonstrations not often unjust, do they not hit the innocent?

If we are to avoid the overstretched Politically Correct explanations according to which the victims of divine violence should humbly not resist it on account of their generic historical responsibility, the only solution is to simply accept the fact that divine violence is brutally unjust: it is often something terrifying, not a sublime intervention of divine goodness and justice. A left-liberal friend from the University of Chicago told me of his sad experience: when his son reached high-school age, he enrolled him in a high school north of the campus, close to a black ghetto, with a majority of black kids, but his son was then returning home almost regularly with bruises or broken teeth – so what should he have done? Put his son into another school with the white majority or let him stay? 

The point is that this dilemma is wrong. The dilemma cannot be solved at this level since the very gap between private interest (safety of my son) and global justice bears witness to a situation which has to be overcome in its entirety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLMEB_q0htk

Four Reasons Young Americans Should Burn Their Student Loan Papers

by Paul Buchheit

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/03/02/four-reasons-young-americans-should-burn-their-student-loan-papers

'Hell No, We Won't Go' — 1967
'No Way, We Won't Pay' — 2015

Fifty years ago students burned their draft cards to protest an immoral war against the people of Vietnam. Today it's a different kind of war, immoral in another way, waged against young Americans of approximately the same age, and threatening them in a manner that endangers not their lives but their livelihoods.

There are at least four good reasons why America's young adults— and their parents—should take up the fight against financial firms who are holding high-interest student loans that total more than the nation's credit card debt, and more than the total income of the poorer half of America.

1. The Protest Has Already Begun

Fifteen former students of for-profit Corinthian Colleges recently announced a debt strikeagainst the company and its predatory loan practices. The 15 students, members of theDebt Collective initiative of debt abolisher Rolling Jubilee, have refused to repay their loans. Corinthian, which has been accused of false marketing, grade tampering, and recruitment improprieties, and which has 60 percent of its students default on loans, was sued in 2013 for employing a "predatory scheme" to recruit students.

2. For-Profit Colleges Use Taxpayer Money for False Marketing to Get MORE Taxpayer Money

Corinthian isn't the only loan predator. Of 15 for-profit colleges investigated by the Government Accountability Office, 13 were found guilty of deceptive marketing, with false job and salary guarantees. The 15 companies got a stunning 86 percent of their funding from the public, in the form of student loans and grants.

Worse yet, a Senate report found that they spend about a quarter of their revenue on marketing, and take 20 percent in profits, while spending only about 17 percent on instruction.

After all that, only 22 percent of students get a degree after six years.

3. Traditional Colleges Aren't Much Better: Students are Treated Like Products for Profit-Makers

Since the 1980s, the number of administrators at private universities has doubled.

To pay all the administrators, tenure-track teachers have been eliminated, and underpaid part-timers have taken their places. Adjunct and student teachers, who made up about 22 percent of instructional staff in 1969, now make up an estimated 76 percent of instructional staff in higher education, with a median wage in 2010 of about $2,700 per course, and with little or no benefits.

To further pay for all the administrators, and to pay for amenities like recreations centers, dining halls, and athletics, tuition has been steadily increasing, to twelve times its cost in 1978.

4. College Graduates Have Been Cheated out of Good Jobs

The unemployment rate may be going down, but the available jobs are well below the skill levels of college-trained adults. According to the New York Federal Reserve, 44 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, holding jobs that are normally held by high school graduates.

College graduates have not recovered from the recession. They took a 19 percent pay cut in the two years after the recession, and by 2013 they were part of the only age group withlower average wages in early 2013 than in 2000. As recently as July of 2014 the Federal Reserve of San Francisco wrote that recent college graduates "were and continue to be hit hard."

Progressive Unity

Progressives have no shortage of important causes, but an attack on predatory student loan policies could be a unifying force for us, particularly if the power of social networking is employed.

An Apple executive said, "The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need." But almost the entirety of corporate profits are being spent on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders, rather than on job training.

The proposal for an America Permanent Fund of $10,000 per household, based on the corporate debt to society for public research, is about the same, in numbers, as the $1.16 trillion of student loan debt. A protest against student loans is a good way to earn the first dividend.

California Stars, Billy Bragg and Wilco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzMbAMO73k

California Stars

Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Jay Bennett/Jeff Tweedy

I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d love to feel your hand touching mine
And tell me why I must keep working on
Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of California stars

I’d like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars
They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine
So, I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e2dShY8jIo