Driftwork

I have been reading Lacanian Ink 28 and 29. Enjoyable but extraordinaily narcissistic in tone. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was reading 29 that the intonation of the lacanians, the style of writing hadn’t changed in decades. ("I am tired of the gossip routine. The fabrication of nice people in nice stories with nice events….” I read from a lacanian in 1983 somehow I foolishly imagine that over two decades a style should change and develop but it hasn’t…) The lacanian tone and style remains frozen in aspic. The issues are full of the archetypical writing that you’d expect from Badiou, Zizek and other fellow travellers of this line of thought, sadly there is nothing contained in the texts that extends current arguments, surprised and a little saddened by Badiou’s refusal of death being an aspect of the ontology, the text 35 propositions are as wonderfully meaningless as the ‘the formulas of the real’, Rex Butler & Scott Stephens agree with Nick that “Capital == Commerce….” (and consequently Capital is eternal, australians are such pessimists) and I can’t help but wonder why Zizek endlessly goes on about some God(s) or other when the logic is always bound to fail because of it’s non-existence, but then it seems obvious that in his heart he wants to commit ‘faith’, the relationship with a stalinist ‘materialist theology’ displaying the extent he wants to be a creationist. My favorite sentence however was Analia Hounie to Badiou: “But philosophy isn’t democratic: for a philosopher there is no equality of opinions and, even more, opinion is a different thing from truth, the proper theme of philosophy…” Really and why is it not democratic ?

The fascinating desire of the lacanian for stalinism, god, phallocentrism and elitism….

s

I know of the work of Joseph Schumpter, but have to admit that I haven’t read anything of his. The reference to ‘capitalism as creative destruction’ does have a certain synergistic relations with Naomi Klien’s new book in which she defines neo-liberalism as ‘disaster capitalism’, the difference being that she is writing in the neo-liberal present where Schumpter was writing in the Keynesian period. (I think she is wrong to call it ‘disaster’ rather than maintain the term emphasis on the disaster that is the ‘neo-liberal’ but….). This phrase “creative destruction is what brings about globalism and technological advances…” isn’t quite what we have in mind. Following from Monad and Serres it’s not difficult to see that the dominant electronic mediums, are all dominated by exchange value, which reduces the forms to disorder and entropy. The concept of creative destruction suggests that things are still melting, but a little thought and investigation shows that what the mediums are atrophying. No longer change but endless conservative repetition in support of the unsustainable. No longer increasing order but steadily increasing disorder as the technologies repeat repeat repeat repeat the same process.

The process seems to be straightforward enough, with the dominance of exchange-value, a unified and singular definition of what and how the medium works and the increasing disorder and the evershrinking space for information. Can we call this ‘creative’ as it becomes impossible to draw truth out of the network unless we accept and recognize the change from information to disorder and exchange ? What is being said then is that Schumpter, as you descibe him, is wrong and that these technologies are no longer radical but inherently conservative. Even allowing for my constructivist tendencies examples are difficult, compare the conservatism of the net in comparision to Blackwells or Foyles(chosen for there academic conservativism), a left blog or net essay will be more eurocentric and masculine than even the words of Brecht (me-ti) in the 1950s. In the early part of the 20th C we’d read Freya Stark for a travelogue now (shorty before we remove their cheap plane flights) we read blogs about trips to europe, east-asia, berlin and iraq… tales of consumption and woe. No longer a world of cybernetic noise but one which reflects the disorder of 21st c capital…

Does this differentiate it enough from the ideologues of the net ?

My own relationship to the net and here, is that finally it’s simply work and silence in the political realm of work is wrong. In some sense or other I suspect that work is all there is, whether it is engineering, human relational, philosophy, politics, culture, reading, writing. Work is like politics ever-present, and this place is merely an aspect of this experiment.

It’s not merely a question of increasing order but also of increasing disorder. In either case within an information system the equivalence between information in the system is (I suggest) unavoidable. To think of the net for example in terms of quality is impossibly difficult and not just because the indicators of quality are essentially ideological, something you demonstrate by the negative reference to fascism, commusnism and anarchy, (negelecting to reference the apologists for liberal democracy), but also because quality does not translate well in empire/globalization.

The other who I was thinking of as I typed, supporting the eqivalence between entopy/negantropy and information was mid period Michel Serres, beyond these we would be talking about Szilard and strange information theorists (of whom the less said the better since content and quality are regarded in this area of engineering as irrelevant). I repeat myself: “Increased entropy in a system results in an increase of disorder within it, an increase of order corrosponds to a diminuation of entropy, or as it is sometimes phrased, a heightening of negative entropy…” However the consequence of this is that the order of a system is “equal to the quantity of information required for a description of a system". With the net and associated media what could be argued is that it takes less information to describe the system now than was required earlier in its history. In respect of the net the concept of increasing order can also be viewed through the fundamental statement of information theory which is that any message will be affected by the noise that accompanies the information it contains, this they argue is the informational equivalent of the second law. However it seems possible that with the net rather than increasing order we should be identifying the increasing disorder (as the explanations of the net become simpler rather than more complex) and consequently the nature of the equivalent systematic relations, becomes entropic.

I would rather suggest that the contrary approach which insists on quality and meaning, remains a prisoner of the fetish of the commodity, a perspective that desperately scrabbles around the media attempting to find something that is reduced in value to exchange-value, that is not reified, that is not reduced to being an aspect of the real subsumption of society by capital (as i/we might once have said). That is to say quality attempts to reintroduce the concept of use-value into the medium…. However this is wrong, a philosophical and consequently political approach should remove the ideological masks and accept (in the spirt of the post-modern) that in the net (the spectacle) there are only exchange values and it is with this in mind that we can construct a different world, through, driftworking in a world of unsustainable commodification, of reified bodies, minds and other non-human things… and arguing for production. (which returns to the beginning and work)

I admit that this use of the second law is both fascinating and horrifying, but probably necessary as the disorder caused by liberal-democracy is in danger of becoming the cause of the biggest genocide in human history…

(some sentiments owed to Negri in case anyone notices, Serres works the concept of noise in many places frequently inverting this rule with an argument about noise as creative, which is deeply attractive apart from being obviously correct).