Monday, November 26, 2007

fetish

Spectrology comes out of social conditions, not ambiguities in old books. But I wonder if this passage in Ricardo inspired some of the gothic mise-en-scène in the first part of Capital:

“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.”

...what Smith and Ricardo mean is that transacting commodity for commodity, or labour for commodity is effectively reducible to a transaction of labour for labour, where commodities are valued according to the labour that goes into their production...

... on the other hand Ricardo's cut and paste can't help but suggest, though accidentally, that the commodity itself somehow attains hex properties, mysteriously "imposing toil on other people".

168 comments:

Le Colonel Chabert said...

this is only a semi-sequitur:

interview with rancière about "literature" - which he says succeeded belles lettres between the late 18th and early 19th c...the inteviewer says
"You show that the novel turns its back on political eloquence to allow things to speak for themselves" and the after the response connects Rancières point to commerce and exchange.

Racière le discours marxiste où la marchandise parle est pour moi comme un héritage de cette nouvelle forme de signifiance qui est comme inventée par la littérature. Pour moi, la théorie du fétichisme de la marchandise est comme une transposition de cette idée d’un langage des choses que l’on trouve chez Balzac, puis Flaubert, et plus tard chez Proust.

The marxist discourse wherein things [choses] speak is for me a sort of inheritance from this new form of significance [Flaubert's idea of style] more or less invented by literature. In my view, the theory of commodity fetishism is like a transposition of this idea of a language of things which one finds in Balzac, Flaubert, later in Proust."

Le Colonel Chabert said...

[The emergence of literature is a deplacement of the place of speech itself. It is no longer [as in belles lettres] the result of one will producing effects in another. From then on, speech is no longer the vehicle of an intention, but begins to speak that much more eloquently for emanating from no mouth, sustained by no will. It is the speech of mute things, a testimony all the more truthful since no one can make them lie. One sees it in Balzac, where the walls, the furniture, the clothes, write the history of a society. It's a refusal of intentional political speech.]



L’émergence de la littérature, c’est un déplacement du lieu même de la parole. Elle n’est plus le résultat d’une volonté pour produire des effets sur une autre volonté. Désormais, la parole n’est plus véhicule d’une intention, mais se met à parler d’autant plus éloquemment qu’elle n’émane d’aucune bouche, soutenu d’aucune volonté. C’est la parole des choses muettes, témoignage d’autant plus vrai que personne ne peut les faire mentir. On le voit chez Balzac, où les murs, les meubles, les vêtements inscrivent l’histoire d’une société. C’est une réfutation de la parole politique intentionnelle


Setting aside the notion that no one can make the things in the realist novel lie - that's presumably Rancière expressing the stance of the realist novelist, not his own assessment (I think, but who knows) - the point throws light on something, tho' perhaps it is the narrative strategies of physiocrats and political economy of the late 18th century that is the first billiard ball knowing novels into realism.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

knocking novels (out of the epistolary, faux memoir, found ms for example) into realism it should have said

Anonymous said...

thanks

I considered doing the comparison between Ricardo's story about hunters, deer, and beavers and George W Hegel, and Lefebvre's "abstract space". This is maybe one for the long winter nights.

Sraffa's introduction (via the link on the Ricardo post) is meant to be the classic analysis of Ricardo's version of LTOV, a reconstruction of a system that very few people at the time apparently really got. This surprised me as Ricardo's writings were undoubtedly massively influential in the period of the corn-laws crisis etc. "Ricardo conquered europe like the inquisition conquered Spain" someone said. I think he's a writer read widely at secondhand, through textbooks etc, and hardly at all directly.

...anyway the first page of this introduction (which I haven't yet read through) goes over Ricardo's anxeities about his style:

"Throughout this period Ricardo was held back by difficulties of composition. As he later complained to Malthus, ‘I make no progress in the difficult art of composition. I believe that ought to be my study’. Trower’s help consisted in the not very practical advice to consult Dr Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Mill, however, sent detailed instructions for the writing of the ‘opus magnum’; by 22 December 1815 he is waiting ‘in anticipation of the MS’ which he expects ‘soon to receive, as part of the great work’; and in giving further instruction as to the mode of writing he insists always that Ricardo should consider his readers ‘as people ignorant of the subject’. Mill also sets him a ‘school exercise’: to give a proof, step by step, of the proposition which he (Ricardo) had often stated, ‘That improvements in agriculture raise the profits of stock, and produce immediately no other effects.’ ‘For as you are already the best thinker on political economy, I am resolved you shall also be the best writer."

Anonymous said...

Pour moi, la théorie du fétichisme de la marchandise est comme une transposition de cette idée d’un langage des choses que l’on trouve chez Balzac, puis Flaubert, et plus tard chez Proust.

yes, il a raison

Anonymous said...

...thought for a minute I'd written something like "the hunter's, dear, or beaver's" - of course the plural of beaver should be beaver

Anonymous said...

...regarding Mark Kpunk, his critical adaptation of neoliberal ideas, which are however unfortunately the dominant ideas in this sociey, might itself be criticiseable but it isn't especially eccentric. I read this in a review of the David Harvey book by Iain Boal & Michael Watts:

"For example, there is a startling observation at the conclusion of Andrew Gamble’s book on Hayek, to the effect that Thatcher's old guru has something to offer anti-capitalists. His own elitism and classical liberal temperament predisposed him to political despotism, yet his analysis of dispersed knowledge, horizontal coordination and spontaneous orders revealed that the most effective forms of social organization were decentralised and democratic"

here

I can understand you could find his writing objectionable, but he's no kind of antisemite.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

k-punk is in the unenviable position of liking what is generally seen as crappy entertanment products and wanting to do the elitist lament of decline of standards of excellence. This is sort of untenable - mass cocaculture can't serve as the sacred and evidence of social health and legitimacy the way elite bourgeois culture could. He's definitely not eccentric, as I mentioned in that thread to which you allude - but his tastes make it caricature. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, with their versions, were all relying on elite culture, on a canon - and their tremendous ENS erudition - a certain cultural capital they inherited. The US academic scene adapted these techniques they created for sustaining the value of their cultural capital (yet another reading of nietzsche, of heidegger, of rousseau, of Sade, rediscovering J de Maistre, etc), exploiting this canon which "belongs to them" but which is threatened by commercial culture and levelling. In the US these techniques were put to another purpose, to valorise the competing crap culture, shitty movies, ads, mass corporate culture. But the elite nature of the critical apparatus and its posture with these crappy artifacts adds up to bathos.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

(The US reception of the French scene is the one dominant in the UK as well)

"antisemite"

Oh I dunno. The "semitism" which for mystic antisemites of the late 19th century was the prime target was Christianity*, which, as in Nietzsche for example, is seen as the seed and heart of both democracy and socialism. It's opposed to the nietzschean artistocraticism and excellence. Christianity, that is, a semitic faith, of Palestinian origin, which conquered and Orientalised Europe over about 700 years. Antisemitism is an ideology of "European civilisation" and its dynamism and creativity. The "clash of civs" is a version of this yerupeenism and aryanism, generalised and flexibilized, capital the aryan creativity, spirit, humanity the semites. Commodity fetishism is the pagan faith native to Yerup; liberty, equality, fraternity and humanism the semitic (Christian) corruption. 300 was a good dramatisation of the current state of this.



*From Tadeusz Micinski (1873-1918), The Gospel Of Lucifer (translation copyright Piotr Sawacki):



Is that you- Messiah longed for by his Nation, wretched from torments of Babylon thraldom, from Sassanid persecutions, from Roman war?

Art “Thy robes red from the blood of the enemies”? Hast Thou lead Thy Folk to suck the milk of nations and to feed on the breasts of the kings? Hast Judah arisen as a lion assailing the enemies in the woods by night? Who is false? You- or Moses and the Prophets?

You do not desire to reign- for your eyes detest purples and
brooches, your arm is too weak for a brass bow and on your
chest there hangs no eagle snatched from the sky with an iron bolt!

Look at the porch of my palace- the king approaches to the altar, where flickers the Joyous Flame-

–and You- born as a bastard, adopted by a carpenter, scorned by numerous sons of your mother, sanctimonious spawn of David, who ordered to cut in half with wood saws all the captives of the conquered land-

Rabbi of the whores and mentally handicapped- demagogue of the never-content rabbis and slave swarm - wandering thaumaturge - Egypt overflows with your likes- the Earth knows thousands better than you- like jamis, yogis and manteurs-

You are unworthy even to light the torch of obedience to brahmis of Delhi and Benares!

A beggar, shelling grains on desolate roads- you are the Son of God?! Your excrements lie about the roads, you lose your semen in dirty dreams- is that how the sons of gods walk?!

You, chandala of the world, you want to rule the world- Jew?!

I know your racial ambition, secret and devouring you up to madness- here on the desert you want to infirm yourself in a conviction, that yours is the power over Israel- and all the other nations, remaining under the rule of Satan- as your circumcisers nobly believe. –You- by the power and benevolence of the Sun- suspended from decomposition, animal organism- you think that you can raise the dead- and at the end of the world you will awake them?! You, of whom not one bone will be left, undevoured by tamarisks or unscattered by the winds- you dream that you have already existed before the Birth- as Logos, the Word of the Primaeval?! –You will allow, that your followers won over by hardship, not knowing anything about the world and its’ laws- bumpkins- will proclaim that: you are the only Son of God, that you were in Paradise, that you have created things seen and unseen, Thrones and Powers… as a first-born of the dead!

Telling them to hide these myths for a time, you will dole out orders like a Messiah- arriving with triumph in Jerusalem - and what crime is equal to that of killing in the Nation the most beautiful of it’s faiths, arisen in the moment of some proud rapture- the faith in the triumph of the Earthly Messiah?! For the crime of these failed hopes the Nation will kill you- but even from the cross you will be throwing glowing coals on the heads of your folk. Madman, in the black night of your mind you have set on fire the Home of Thy Mother Earth- with this insane urge to martyrdom.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

(The issue of Jew-hating is kind of a distraction which makes it difficult to see continuities of yerupeen petty bourgeois antibourgoisism. There's variety but the grounding themes and framwork is remarkably constant. "right vs. left" is not a good perspective to approach it from - its alliances in a given moment, the uses to which it is put, the emphases of the moment, the extras, make it one or the other. Now any instances of this too strongly associated with Jew hating are quarantined as if they were somehow the Other of the culture of Yerup, and this gives a greatly diminished and distorted picture of petty bourgeois dissident thought (be it conservative reactionary or "radical" futurist) in the imperial centre since 1848.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

the rewrite which changes "neither washington nor moscow" into "neither washington nor tehran" (the capital of the state capitalist superpower is replaced by a brand/trope, not the actual power centre of an empire but the figure of the central hive of mooozlims, of "political islam", and kpunk says of course there may be some decent civilised political moozlims though he has yet to meet one himself and nobody can tell him where they are hiding) is a pretty standard adaptation/transformation of the international socialist position into the clash of civs paradigm of the petty bourgeois antibourgeoisism to which antisemitism belongs. washington, seat of the supernatural demiurge Capital, Tehran, hive of the insect conspiracy.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

It all becomes clear if you ask self why the really superfluous gesture of declaring that "the Left" doesn't heart fundieturr is not formulated as: "neither Washington nor Riyadh" or "neither Wall Street nor Langley".

Le Colonel Chabert said...

just noticed too that the bit of "Tehran" that lurks in Slovenia in that article is othered by Zizek, who takes the opportunity of a NYT piece to declare most muslims in slovenia '"immigrants". It's a sheer lie. The vast majority of muslims resident in slovenia were born in slovenia, the vast majority (virtually all) in the country of which slovenia was part at their birth, born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence. The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised; they never emigrated/immigrated. They became "foreign" from the pov of the LDS-led state when Slovenia was aryanised and christianised, but they didn't become "immigrants". But in a paragraph they are transformed, with practising British Muslims and all the practising Muslims of the world, into outposts of "Tehran". It's not really about Muslims, or Arabs, but as is traditional with antisemitism, about Us, Yerup, our cohesion, the cohesion of this particular "the Left" with Capital through yerup conceived in this traditional way.

catmint said...

I'm not endorsing what he writes (neither approbation nor scorn! today it's "is the Weird inherently Lacanian, or is Lacanianism just one mode of the Weird?") Leaving aside, if that's possible, the degree to which he may or may not have deliberately misinterpreted your argument, since I'm unaware of the discussion this came out of and not especially interested now, you can certainly criticise his choice of words: "it is what Marx came to abolish" suggests a kind of predetermined teleology, the sentiment he means to express is surely something like this:

"the professional conspirators, who all belong to the bohème ... views the true leaders of the proletariat as its adversary. The Communist Manifesto brings their political existence to an end. "

the first choice is less accurate but not bad copy

this is how he justifies his slogan "neither Washington nor Tehran" :

"The irony of the SWP's position is that it exactly falls into the logic previously repudiated by Trotskyists, that of an either-or disjunction between equally unpalatable alternatives. Where once Trotskyists refused to accept the false 'choice' between capitalism and Stalinism, proclaiming 'neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism', now the SWP seems to accept that it is a straight choice between EITHER capitalism OR political Islam, no buts. It has, in other words, obediently complied with the thinking of its Master (Signifier), the US, colluding in the racial delirium of 'one lone madman' that has replaced the MAD logic of cold war paranoia."

Is this a reasonable characterisation of the SWPs position? In the context of acrimony between left-wing groups its not a particularly excessive deformation. This actually relates now to the dispute between the SWP and the CPGB over whether Hands off the People of Iran ought to be admitted to the Stop the War coalition, since HOPI has a platform actively criticising the Tehran régime. This was on Lenin's Tomb yesterday. HOPI now really does use the slogan "neither Washington nor Tehran". From Mark? I don't know.

He might have something of the Dostoyevskyan nihilist in him, but I don't recognise the kind of thinking that's apparent in Nietzsche or Pessoa, or for that matter that "great conservative" T. S. Eliot.

catmint said...

"in a paragraph they are transformed, with practising British Muslims and all the practising Muslims of the world, into outposts of "Tehran"."

yes, this is ugly

catmint said...

"but as is traditional with antisemitism, about Us, Yerup, our cohesion, the cohesion of this particular "the Left" with Capital through yerup conceived in this traditional way."

yeah, I know what you mean, I don't have any real investment in Mark K-P, but my impression is this isn't what he's about. He's a diffident figure. It's copy: "neither Washington nor Tehran" and his thoughts as they occur to him.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

I don't claim to have read mark punk too much or too carefully except what he wrote in my comments box or in reply to some post of mine. I was never in the SWP - years ago the SLP in the US (DeLeonist: I was basically born into that party).

"the SWP seems to accept that it is a straight choice between EITHER capitalism OR political Islam, no buts"

This is really just a slander, necessitated to justify the rest of the post, to flesh out zizek's straw man; the post was just defending the Zizek islamophobic harrangue from the criticisms but not actually addressing the content of any of them, instead inventing a kind of excuse, a menace (the SWP in league with Tehran) threatening "the Left", that required Z's white supremacist, thoroughly unfactual, white house propaganda tirade (complete with thoroughly imaginary "terrorist mobs" of "violent" Muslims violently not buying Danish butter and violently uttering and even writing opinions) "conjuncturally".

Le Colonel Chabert said...

Well but their "neither washington nor tehran" refers to tehran, the place. K-punk was referring to me and my neighbors, who are in Paris, and is neighbors in London; i think he just imports it from Zizek really, its a discursive ethnic cleansing.

you could imagine "neither washington nor tel aviv" having a meaning, if you were referring to israel, israelis, tel aviv actually. But if "tel aviv" was evoked to mean "world jewry" as "tehran" is evoked by kpunk as "world islam", well, this is the difference between the presence and absence of the ideology of Yerup whose principle form was antisemitism and is now an adaptation which has dropped the ashkenazim from the picture.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10289

they're really speaking of the Iranian régime, which nobody calling himself a leftist could possibly wish to declare immune from criticism and resistance. But it's pretty vile to suggest that every muslim and non muslim in the world wishing to rebut those gross arabophobic cartoons and the bullshit stances of enlightened press reprinting thyem is an agent of that atrocious and criminal tyranny. That association is achieved I am afraid to say only via a kind of racial middle concept.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

obviously the SWP recognises for example that Tehran is the capital of Iran, and that the Iranian economy is capitalist.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

oh my argument by the way was not about political islam or tehran at all; I was objecting to this fictional christiano-atheist tolerant Yerup with a "civilisation" all its own, and how Zizek erased China from the globe to present a world divided as propaganda requires between our yerupeen enlightened civilisation and their fundie terrorist barbaric uncivilisation.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

" but my impression is this isn't what he's about"

I don't know:

What is needed now more than ever is a certain coldness, a certain refusal of sentimentalism. (And Le Trader might like to come on all hard bitten cynical, but at bottom she's a sentimentalist; what is her Lawrence of Arabia-style fetishising of Third World struggles if it is not sentimental?) We need to do just as Marx recommended, and accelerate, not resist, capital's destruction of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities. It might be tempting to find bolt holes of reactionary tradition in which to take flight from the scouring winds of capital, but it is a temptation to be vehemently resisted. The non-organic product of capital's 'Frankensteinian surgery of the cities' (Lyotard), the proletariat emerges from the destruction of all ethnicities, the desolation of all tradition, the destitution of any home

That seems pretty unequivocal to me. (Marx never recommended any such thing of course). If it's not, as Leninino remarked, just posturing machismo, what could it mean to accelerate capital's devastations? One thing would be kick the Roma out of Slovenia. Another would be to destroy Iraq, kill a lot of people, break up the country. So.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"accelerate, not resist, capital's destruction of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities"

we certainly can't accelerate this by evoking "european legacies worth fighting for"? but yes we can. Because as Z says "universalism is eurocentrist". (i guess that's a nifty "paradox".) So what is meant is abu ghrab, new orleans, subjective destitution and deterritorialisation of that sort, destroy people identified as of other ethnicities, their "traditions", and their "territorialities", because we yerupeens are after all already deterritorialised and universal, that is what it means to be yerupeen, we are deterritorialisation's embodied essence, the unraced unethnic citizens of the globe whom nobody calls "immigrants" no matter where we expat ourselves too, and we are assisting capital, which has a well known "to destroy" list. "Neither washington nor tehran" turns out, as one expects given the asymmetries of the terms, explicitly to mean accelerate "washington's" destruction of "tehran", "washington"=capital and "tehran"=all of humanity (as 'orientals').

Le Colonel Chabert said...

“The Weird”: is a moral(ist) posture, involving a kind of recursive autocritique/autodefence of stolid bourgeois commonsensicality, produced entirely stylistically; it’s an effect contrived by matching plodding chronological narration in a just shy of satirical pastiche of some impersonal intitutionalese (stodgy bureaucratic, judicial, constabulary, archival or journalistic) to outlandish borderline-comedic fantastic content, to throw the institutional customary intelligence (its limitations, lack of imagination, slavishness to custom, narrowmindedness and naïveté but also its reassuring imperturbability) into relief, and to fancifully disrupt the "normal" it caricatures and represents only to secure it more firmly in place. Ain’t it? A kind of down mass market Merleau-Ponty against positivism ‘accidentally’ leaving it strengthened.

traxus4420 said...

hi

sorry i didn't follow up on the comment i left on the marx post, you answered my question though.

literature as a "refusal of intentional political speech" sounds like a point begging to be made. though if you want to talk about things speaking for themselves, what about 18th century 'it' narratives, where you have objects that serve as the focus of experience (usually as a self-referential device)? or do they 'speak' too much to be called things?

"a moral(ist) posture, involving a kind of recursive autocritique/autodefence of stolid bourgeois commonsensicality, produced entirely stylistically; it’s an effect contrived by matching plodding chronological narration in a just shy of satirical pastiche of some impersonal intitutionalese (stodgy bureaucratic, judicial, constabulary, archival or journalistic) to outlandish borderline-comedic fantastic content, to throw the institutional customary intelligence (its limitations, lack of imagination, slavishness to custom, narrowmindedness and naïveté but also its reassuring imperturbability) into relief, and to fancifully disrupt the "normal" it caricatures and represents"

isn't this just a definition of fiction?

what i left out at the end is i think the debatable part.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"or do they 'speak' too much to be called things?"

one is a dog, Pompey the Little.

I wish John Pistelli's archives had not vanished; there was a great post about a book on Scarlet Letter that argued something really well about the opting out of political speech, the prose creating a situation of liberalism, sort of, inviting a specific kind of debate. (What's the "A" mean? but on every level.) Then charlotte street had a thread also related, and that's gone too.

"isn't this just a definition of fiction?"

I don't think so, no. Not anyway the thing I meant specifically to describe. Compare "the Weird" to the literary fantastic. "The Weird" - if I understand what texts this category is considered to contain - is adequate to itself. It's unmysterious. Tale and telling match. They emerge from the same place of utile randomness. All in the end is reliable. The uncanny is sustained uncertainty. The "weird" is something about which we are wholly sure, that is, a sign, a marker for "the unknown" or "the abnormal" - not because it is necessarily in any way unknown or abnormal, but the text tells us frankly its functioning as that from another perspective in the text, which is fixed - and at the same time a transparent and narrow one to one metaphor for something ordinary and known. The uncanny and the fantastic deploy the symbolic, while "the weird" is a kind of simplified allegory; but the code is simple and you are expected to solve it with reference to a complete key, already in your possession. I'll find some examples to illustrate what I mean shortly.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

I mean to say "he barks and whimpers too much". I like those "circulation" novels a lot. But its the market the circulation describes rather than the circulating thing that's eloquent perhaps. I see what rancière is saying about balzac and objects, but then jameson insisted this very same feature actually located the "bourgeois ego", the subject (of commodities), the consciousness from which the narrative emerges. Put them together and...

traxus4420 said...

"sounds like a point begging to be made" - sounds like a point that has been begging to be made


i know what k-punk means by 'the weird' and i think your description of it is accurate; i am just wondering if it can be extended. being difficult, in other words.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

okay: i will extend it, but i have to find some excerpts for examples, because its about the prose, not just the synopses.

(i think jonathan strange and mr norrel belongs to this conception of "the weird", though it's really twee.)

traxus4420 said...

sorry, by 'extended' i mean maybe the definition can be extended to apply to other genres than just 'the weird,' that the moralist posture and 'just-shy of pastiche' prose style parasitic on institutional discourses is an adequate description of fictional prose.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

(btw, i didn't read kpunk's thing, just picking up on catmint's passing remark; so i'm not replying to or arguing with whatever he contends.)

Le Colonel Chabert said...

ah.

good point.

something like The Quincunx develops this inquiry as a theme. Also A Frolic of His Own. Variations on the production of irony. Better than theoretical works attacking the question I think.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

and of course Nabokov.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

whom I hugely admire and really dislike and so always at first forget.

But Ada, or Ardor is like a treatise on that question:

"He travelled..."

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"the form in which...capitalist philistinism appears in science is ecclecticism, the elevation of the philistine 'on the one hand, on the other hand' to a scientific 'method', the denial of the contradictions of life, or - what comes to the same thing - the superficial, immediate and uncomprehending rigid counterposing of contradictory determinations. The more embellished this ecclecticism, the hollower it generally is inside." - Lukacs, "Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decay"

traxus4420 said...

sadly i haven't read any of the things you just referenced, though that is a nice quote from lukacs.

i am not usually a big fan of fiction that is excessively 'meta,' the post-ulysses type of text that initially seem like such fun to theorize until you realize all the heavy lifting has been done for you, with just some blank spaces to be filled in.

the quincunx looks like something i might like, though.

i wanted to comment on this:

"k-punk is in the unenviable position of liking what is generally seen as crappy entertanment products and wanting to do the elitist lament of decline of standards of excellence. This is sort of untenable - mass cocaculture can't serve as the sacred and evidence of social health and legitimacy the way elite bourgeois culture could. He's definitely not eccentric, as I mentioned in that thread to which you allude - but his tastes make it caricature."

i'm pretty much over k-punk (and agree with the critiques of his 'weird' politics and irresponsible/often vapid rhetoric), but this characterization i think is too quick.

what i understand him to be doing is a very careful (according to his own standards) appropriation of this mass 'cocaculture' and its 'indie' or experimental contingents, along with french theory, in order to generate through bricolage an alternative elite culture. i don't see how this is a problem in itself, as corporate mass culture is regularly appropriated by its audience to form something like folk cultures, which are regularly in competition.

the attitude he takes kind of reminds me of hip-hop battling, actually, complete with incongruous references, class resentment, and hypermasculine bravado. the politics are formally similar as well.

where he enters the realm of simulacra for me is when he appears to want this style to do the work of serious political analysis (not defending/valorizing his taste and that of his friends, which is perfectly natural), but then i don't see how this is different from derrida or deleuze (or zizek or baudrillard) doing the same thing with their inherited elite culture. history is necessarily more a part of what they do, but none of these people are historians really, they're aesthetes and philosophers, partisans mainly in that sense.

and doesn't the term 'cocaculture' already suggest a decline and lament?

Le Colonel Chabert said...

thanks traxus; can't really comment on kpunk's project, having only read a little, but what i have read has the flavour of a lot of US product; the incongruity is between the explicitly elitist tone of the theory and the objects. The elitist tone is inherited from Deleuze and Derrida. Men of staggering bourgeois learning; fully groomed to the class positions by an institution that is very selective. Their style fits with their objects; the masonic language and all. The combination of lacanese and comic books seems now kind of natural to us; its been around a quarter of a century. But it's still creating this bathetic effect; it still overreaches. Maybe moreso since for fifteen years this kind of stuff has been produced with that kind of reception in mind - it is explicitly tailored to be readily legible by this discourses. The the discourses really depend on a kind of seriousness and difficulty; their whole posture is wow, we need better tools because Heidegger is really dense and difficult. So matching these tools to comic books, the effect is top heavy. And the result is the theory really does become the star, and the comic books are the pretext to exhibit the machine of the theory, put it through its paces. I don't speak just or particularly of Kpunk; its a general thing. The theory then grows into a kind of big tchochki, one takes it out to play with; these comic books don't need reading actually, but they're fodder to run the machine. There ceases to be any critical product of the theoretical machine; it's predestined, known in advance, the comics are fed into the machine just to demonstrate the machine's parts and workings, just to reproduce the machine. Nothing comes out. Turbulent Velvet wrote of Lacan involve "memorise and apply hierarchies"...The machine ceases to be an interpretive tool because there is nothing to interpret. You run a comic book through Lacan and what comes out is just Lacan: object a, the Real, the Symbolic, the Imaginary. It's the opposite of interpretation really, the process in reverse. What is supposed to be the cypher is the code, what is supposed to be the theoretical approach is the thing produced by it. The texts vanish into the machine. The lightweightness of the "objects" guarantees nothing can emerge but yet another set of specs of the machine exactly like those from which it was built. It's a kind of simply copying operation. And it doesn't feel like an inadequate "reading" of the comic books because, well, they're pretty transparent to start with. So its not like the machine is called into question. One wonders why you run another comic book through it. It seems compulsive. The machine becomes a toy - look, it lights up! And then the very grandeur of the machine - its so huge and imposing - is comical. Like you have a machine the size of buckingham palace, and as ornate, and every day someone pours water into it, and it lights up and in the windows waltzing couples swirl and an hour later, the water comes out the other end, steaming, into a mug you've placed in the tray with a teabag. The elaborate kettle for making yet another cup of tea.

Just the critique or analysis of mass canned culture doesn't have this effect. It's the combination of the grandiosity of this particular genre of continental theory, with its jargon and its kind of pompous claims to revolutionary radicalism and profundity, with the nature of this product that creates that bathos.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"he appears to want this style to do the work of serious political analysis "

well isn't this though really just built into the jargon? does he really choose this, or is it just how the language and the methods are already labelled. And then the effect is silly, because why do you need that nuclear reactor to open that bag of potato chips? The chips are not actually that well defended by that bag, you can deal with them a lot less dramatically.

Which is not to poo poo the chips, or an analysis of chips. But with these theoretical tools and language, these "critiques" end where they ought to begin. A long long procedure that is really just synopsis. No interpretation, just description. And then never proceeding to any interesting place (to history and political economy). It's the gestures and trappings of "critique" but it is actually entirely pre-critical.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

the bathos, like the hysteria, is not necessarily a bad thing of course, but emerges from the situation of an author with a certain project and certain available material and working under certain incentives and pressures. But there are different ways to put elite and mass culture product into confrontation/interaction; this is one, and what one gets out of spectating is limited.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"doesn't the term 'cocaculture' already suggest a decline and lament?"

mebbe. I'm trying to stress how it's produced. When one says "culture" even if modified by "mass", there's a kind of set of implications...I want to stress certain features of this "culture" product that make it more like cans of coca cola than like, say, 18th century dirty books.

Anonymous said...

The vast majority of muslims resident in slovenia were born in slovenia, the vast majority (virtually all) in the country of which slovenia was part at their birth, born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence. The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised; they never emigrated/immigrated.

Will you please actually read some history before you adumbrate and embarrass yourself further; MUZLIM is a term invented by Josip Broz Tito for Serbs and Croats who were forcibly islamicized during 500 years of quite ruthless Turkish rule, you sentimental Oriental cow. There is no such thing as an indigenous Muslim. This has nothing to do with Slovene racism as you justly critisize it, but on the other hand it is your lack of historical knowledge that makes you think Moozlims in Yugoslavia are not only all virtuous and good but also AUTHENTIC. You and Leninushka really have to attend some courses at the People's Adult Learning Center in Belgrade if you have the ambition of defending our cause in the West, otherwise fuck off with your appalling generalizations and exaggerations.

Anonymous said...

yeah, I know what you mean, I don't have any real investment in Mark K-P, but my impression is this isn't what he's about.

translation:

'' I actually kind of like kpunk but I wouldn't DREAM OF saying that in front of Missus''

Anonymous said...

i'm pretty much over k-punk (and agree with the critiques of his 'weird' politics and irresponsible/often vapid rhetoric), but this characterization i think is too quick.

Traxus if the strongest qualifier you can use for Missus's histronics in the neverending dispute with K-punk is ''too quick'' then you're ready to be shipped to the Parisian Xanadu... and I don't fucking care what happens to you there!

Anonymous said...

"What is needed now more than ever is a certain coldness, a certain refusal of sentimentalism"

yeah, Mark evidently doesn't have to work in a shipping container

traxus4420 said...

"The the discourses really depend on a kind of seriousness and difficulty...matching these tools to comic books, the effect is top heavy. And the result is the theory really does become the star, and the comic books are the pretext to exhibit the machine of the theory, put it through its paces."

this is what zizek does, but less so k-punk i think -- also the obviously mass culture material he deals with -- superhero comics, TV serials, ads, hollywood movies and pop singers -- is maybe 1/3 of the output, the rest of it is stuff like joy division, '70s punk and j.g. ballard, this is his canon.


"It's the combination of the grandiosity of this particular genre of continental theory, with its jargon and its kind of pompous claims to revolutionary radicalism and profundity, with the nature of this product that creates that bathos...isn't this though really just built into the jargon? does he really choose this, or is it just how the language and the methods are already labelled. "

but aren't you suggesting here that the grandiosity of this genre and its difficult jargon is also inadequate to its object when that object is political economy? for me the bathos is very much there in something like 'specters of marx,' as a direct result of derrida's 'staggering bourgeois learning' when applied to something that is not a novel or a work of philosophical speculation.

Anonymous said...

"There is no such thing as an indigenous Muslim"

irrespective of the faults of the Yugo system citizenship was universal and you could choose to participate in any religion, yes? In fact religion was actively discouraged. How can you object to calling these people indigenous and Muslim? This sounds like Le Pen or something Dejan.

Anonymous said...

...it may also exemplify the kind of RURAL IDIOCY K-Punk came to abolish

traxus4420 said...

"And then the effect is silly, because why do you need that nuclear reactor to open that bag of potato chips? The chips are not actually that well defended by that bag, you can deal with them a lot less dramatically."

in capitalism & schizophrenia deleuze/guattari regularly treat pulp culture quite favorably, lovecraft, pk dick, conan doyle...they are not exactly 'critical' of these authors, the idea is to 'extend' them -- basically to treat them as philosophical allies. it is anti-critical.
this is what k-punk is going for, and for his fan base it works to valorize both the theory and the object. touching the x-men with lacan both validates the comics fans and weakens the class boundaries that surround lacan. it's mostly only for people who don't share his taste -- don't like comics or his favorite bands or whatever -- that the bathos emerges (my ticker didn't go off until he started talking about rihanna). even serious lacan people like sinthome seem satisfied that k-punk is bringing lacan's important theories to the masses; i think it's more of a pragmatic issue for those who are primarily invested in the theory as intrinsically useful/true, and where mass culture is read as the symptom of the social body.

traxus4420 said...

"yeah, Mark evidently doesn't have to work in a shipping container"

LOL

traxus4420 said...

k-punk's status (limited as it is) is more interesting to me than the content of what he writes, in other words.

Anonymous said...

hello Traxus,

I'm engaged in other stuff but please feel free to continue your discussion

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"Will you please actually read some history before you adumbrate and embarrass yourself further; "

dejan, dummy: there are 47000 muslims in slovenia. zizek refers to them as "mostly immigrants". this is in fact false, most were born in what is today slovenia, and almost all settled in slovenia when it was in the country of their citizenship. they never emigrated and thus are not immigrants. the country was altered.

Even the press releases from the slovene government about this mosque confirms in almost ever statement that the community did not immigrate to slovenia. they have been "asking to built a mosque for thirty years". That is, since before there was a Slovenia to immigrate to, this community was there, lawfully resident, in possession of citizenship of the FRY, asking to built a mosque. Only the ethnic aryanists nationalists like zizek describe this community as foreign to slovenia, and only zizek as "immigrants". Immigrants, dejan, are people who move from one country to another. the vast majority of muslims in slovenia never moved from the country of their birth to another.

"There is no such thing as an indigenous Muslim." you're a crazed tribalist freak dejan with fantasies of pure national comunities as freakish as zizek's. Next you'll be saying there are no 'indigenous' Jews, Rom or wimmin. but even the constitution of slovenia formally recognises a portion of slovenia's muslim population (some rom are identified) as "auchthonous".

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"for me the bathos is very much there in something like 'specters of marx,' as a direct result of derrida's 'staggering bourgeois learning' when applied to something that is not a novel or a work of philosophical speculation"

Yeah. Kind of yes. But its effects are more unsettling than bathos too. derrida's mannerisms by then had become generally ridiculous, no matter what the topic, and this is highlighted strongly when he reads Marx and also discusses third world debt, global living standards, "mafia"s and other topics of moment. But the real problems with the reading of marx are not these mannerisms, the endless gestures of hestitation which are kind of a corruption of a (post war radical intellectual) obligation to autocritique as confession of (self)interest and antagonism, which become the opposite with derrida, elaborate self abnegating claims of disinterest. There is a bathos I guess coming out of those gestures, and the banality of the priestly vows, when taking on "the state of the debt". I guess even the word play wit there - "the state of the debt" seeking to wed his debt to marx and the imperial periphery's debts to global capital - should produce bathos, but it's so egoist and arrogant its kind of nastier than that, not at all humorous, too disquieting to be risible.

in the long examination of marx' reply to stirner, what happens with the interpretive method and the text doesn't seem so much the crumbling of the tools before the stately and complex and dignified object. Something else.

the contact of these (various an diverse but in tone similar) ENS methods and mass culture objects is not always and not necessarily bathetic (the willard reading is famously great for example). i guess i'm talking about the bottom drawer product, which is easy to criticise; i haven't read much kpunk but everything i have read is in that drawer. He's clearly a talented writer and I am ready enough to believe I've read only the worst, because what I have read is always some posturing that is clearly dishonest and overly emotional, reflex reacting to perceived, hugely exaggerated threats to his traditions, territorialities etc.. The tone is paranoid and panicked, as kenoma said, like english tabloid papers, the complaints mainly the same too. But I'm sure my sample is unrepresentative because I only end there from links which are about some "controversy", like zizek's 300 review or his response to antigram's lecturing him about his self-pity. so except for something long ago about 18th century gothic novels, which formed my initial impression that he's kind of elevating his painful mishigas to faux principled doctrine, (something he seems to admit), i only have read either his tantrums or his attempts at rope a doping.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"k-punk is bringing lacan's important theories to the masses"

okay; i think mass culture is well worth reading actually (as you know). I just think kpunk is a very lame reader, and the granditosity of his declared methods make this kind of risibly evident. But he's just one example of this realm of sort of amateur jargonised movie reviewing. It's a form of advertising principally. Fan chatter. Which is not eeeevil but as you say when loaded with this pretence to political relevance (or even to just political criticism, to political analysis) its not delivering on its boasts. But it's not i think that he doesn't realise the political potential of his project; i think he's really actually politically a reactionary. not racist, sexist, fuddy duddy conservative reactionary but a neolib reactionary. So on its own terms what he's doing "succeeds" ideologically and only fails because its not very widely consumed.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

(deleuze and guattari don't do the Daily Mail style lament for the decline of the quality of television, that i recall, or demand a renewed Aristocratic Excellence from endemol.)

Le Colonel Chabert said...

i mean if you are actually watching big brother regularly, you cannot without "exposing yourself" complain about the invisible idiots, i think k-punk used the malapropism "lowest common denominator", whose immoral tastes are to blame for it. The imaginary rest of the mesmerised audience that doesn't notice how morally decadent the show is. When you youself are actually the audience for this. That's what I meant initially to point out - the use of the ENS jargon to make value judgements about which episode of big brother is better, and give unsolicited advice to the producers on how to improve it. Those methods were not designed for that purpose and also have features which make that application nonsensical. It's off the wall and incongruous. There is a built in bathos to denouncing the declining quality of reality television. (and the lament and hysterical demand in the form of content kibbitzing is not typical of confessedly political interpretations of mass culture product produced in universities).

Le Colonel Chabert said...

clarify: yes, i agree, bathos is a major effect in spectres of marx. but its not just that, and its not really analogous to the bathos of lacanian readings of The Apprentice which end up pitching future story suggestions.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"in order to generate through bricolage an alternative elite culture"

right. but the political alternative to elite culture is not another elite culture. or, that is not an emancipatory or socialist approach to culture; it is a petty bourgeois antibourgeoisism. And the elitist will to power emerges quite clearly at times, for example zizek has a license to love 300 but the anonymous dummies whose immoral sensual greed is responsible for it need to be reformed ruthlessly by zizek himself for their bad taste. Much like alan specter and orin hatch giggling about how they consume porn, which they have to keep out of the hands of the ignorant masses by force, for their own good. The dream of becoming that gentleman's club, of already being the gentlemen's club, the elite which watches big brother ironically and in a revolutionary way, imagining itself distinct from the horde who are imagined watching it naively and being harmed by it and also responsible for it. The elite is identified by its superior tastes in attitudes of big brother consumption; this is what qualifies it to perform the frankenstein surgery on those too animal others in the audience who watch it unelitely.

the moral reform of "the masses" by an elite whose superiority is aesthetic, equipped with its own (acquired, of course, not produced) superior culture product...is a familiar, varied, but never emancipatory project.

Anonymous said...

Immigrants, dejan, are people who move from one country to another. the vast majority of muslims in slovenia never moved from the country of their birth to another.

Did you even read what I wrote, you Commie shill: ''Muslim'' as a nation only came to existence with the Tito-Kardelj constitution. It's their Communist INVENTION. Those Muslims were not born into islam, and they didn't migrate to Yugoslavia from islamic countries. They are Serbs and Croats who were converted to islam. Their status as a nation was fabricated by that constitution in an attempt to fragment the space further. This has nothing to do with Slovenian racism, which is repulsive as any other racism, but it has a lot to do with the way Tito's constitution prepped the ground for the divisions which later blossomed into fullon Slovenian racism. For if those ''Muslims'' weren't led to believe that they are a separate ethnic entity, they would not have felt themselves quite as ''apart'' from the other Serbs and Croats and Alija Izetbegovic could not recruit them for ethnic wars. But the Empire was breeding resentment, pitting neighbour against neighbour, through the very fabric of the Constitution, largely inspired by nationalist Marxism from Austra, which Kardelj supported. There are much SMALLER groups of islamic believers from other countries - like Turks - but the majority of the ''Muslims'' is Serbo-Croatian.

I understand that this seriously puts into question your and Leninuni's Commie theorizing, according to which the pow Albanian wimmin and childrin of Kosovo were put under a humanist threat instead of being subjected to their Master's Talibani-style breeding explosion policies sponsored by the same Kardelj and Tito whose product par excellance Dr. Zizek is.

I realize also that this relativizes your Aladdin and Lawrence of Arabia cultural product fantasies, but my sweet, you need to wake up to realities.

Anonymous said...

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/1935/history.html

In the Tito era, for the first time since World War I, Bosnian Muslims received official recognition of their separate identity (i.e. they were no longer forced to declare themselves as Serbs or Croats).

Anonymous said...

http://www.hercegbosna.org/engleski/komyu.html

On the second place were Bosnian Muslims who were supported by the Tito's supreme authority as the bearer of the "statehood" tendencies in Bosnia and Hercegovina and like the counter-balance to the Serbian and Croatian national apirations and, as the high birth-rate "Oriental" ethnos, which, paradoxically, having given up many Oriental-Islamic ways of life, was good anyway like the bridge to the Islamic countries in the Non-alignment movement. Grateful to the Communist Yugoslavia which recognized them the status of a nation, as well as brainwashed with the indoctrination by which they "succeeded" to forget their massive participation in the armed forces of NDH - Bosnian Muslims became the factor number 2

Anonymous said...

http://www.nato.int/sfor/indexinf/122/p03a/chapter6.htm

The Bosnian-Muslims
When the FRY was founded there had been only two recognized ethnic groups, Bosnian-Croats and Serbs. In 1968, the Bosnian-Muslims were also declared to be a distinct nation. A new constitution adopted in 1974 led to increased decentralization of governmental powers, giving the six federal states of the republic more political and economic independence, and giving Vojvodina and Kosovo autonomous status. Economic and political developments from 1974 to 1980 set the scene for the ruin of Yugoslavia and the beginning of new conflict in the Balkans.

Anonymous said...

How can you object to calling these people indigenous and Muslim?

You weren't reading either; I explained that MUSLIM AS A NATION, get it, a NATION, was established by Tito and Kardelj's sequential Commie constitutions *one in the 1960s, the other in the 1970s. It is since that time that they feel themselves separate from other nations. They have henceforth been manipulated both by the Empire, and by extremist Muslim leaders like Izetbegovic, into separation wars. I have explained several thousands of times that Tito's Yugoslav constitution was structured so that it would breed nationalism and mutual resentment. Before MUSLIMS became a nation, there were no significant disputes between Christian and Islamic Slavs.

But this truthfully is not easy to explain to a Communist like Sherbert, who actually thinks it was great and lovely in Tito's self-management, what with all those syndical pork chops and collective vacations to Brioni.

Anonymous said...

i don't see how this is a problem in itself, as corporate mass culture is regularly appropriated by its audience to form something like folk cultures, which are regularly in competition.

Childie it's a problem because k-punk doesn't want to champion the braindead lumpenproletariat, onion hanging from its ass, unable to read and write and totally insensitive to any culture other than daytime TV, which is the target group that the Marxian Cobra's idealizes and patronizes the better to put her own elitarianism, cultural bigotry and worship of burgeois kitsch from sight. k-punk believes in an intelligent and enlightened proletariat, but this is the kind of a proletariat that sees through the Cobra's deceptions, you see Childie.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

dejan let me spell this out for you.

there is a congregation of practising Muslims in Lubilijana, as there is a congregation of practising Jews, and several of Catholics, and a few protestants. And the christians have churchs for their services. The Jews got a torah recently and opened a synagogue; before that they held services in the home of the rabbi.

the muslim congregation is bigger than the jewish one. they rent halls for their religious services. for thirty years the clergy and administrators of this congregation have been trying to get a mosque built for the dedicated use of this congregation which practises the religion known as Islam.

a mosque, in case you are unfamiliar, is like a church or a synagogue. But for this religion called Islam.

this congregation is made up of really existing identifiable individuals. with birth certificates, names, and everything. They're not figments in fictions you can interpret as you please.

Slavoj Zizek referred to this congregation, those who go to services in rented halls and whose clergy is trying to get permission to build a mosque.

He referred to these really existing people as "mostly immigrants."

It is simply a lie.

The reason he called them "immigrants" is not because they practise Islam. Most of the people whom he refers to as "immigrants" or "non slovenes in Slovenia" practise no religion at all. It is because he and his other ethnic nationalists consider these individuals racially non-aryan. The large majority of these people are culturally Slovene. They speak Slovenian as their native tongue. 90% of this congregation is of ethnic bosnijak origin, the rest are mainly ethnically albanian. The vast majority of the community which supports the mosque and presently attends services were born in the republic of Slovenia and refer to themselves as bosnijak slovenes. They are not immigrants; they are seen as such, as "foreign" to "slovene soil" and "the (mystic) slovene nation" by those who ascribe to blut and boden mystical nationalist aryanism, like yourself.

None of these people converted to Islam to serve in the local Ottoman government or practise certain professions during Ottoman rule, though some of their distant ancestors did. Not even a mooozlim lives that long dejan. The last turkish garrison left Serbia in the middle of the 19th century. Long before even the eldest of the practising Muslims attending religious services in Lublijana was born.

Anonymous said...

They are not immigrants; they are seen as such, as "foreign" to "slovene soil" and "the (mystic) slovene nation" by those who ascribe to blut and boden mystical nationalist aryanism, like yourself.

Oh but how typical of you to twist words according to your Communist agenda. How many times in this comments thread did I say I was not referring to Slavoj Zizek's treatment of ''Muslims'' living in Slovenia, or his Aryanism, or his racism, all of which deserves total reproach, but to the implied but erroneous construction that a MUSLIM is something that exists as an independent entity, when it was created by Tito??? A nation is not solely defined by its confession, you know.

And why are you the whole time NOT mentioning ''Muslim'' racists, bigots and Aryans who used the opportunity given them by Tito to run a seccesionist and nationalist agenda which ultimately blew up Bosnia? Why are they excused from your harsh critique?

Yet again you fall into your Communist loop, one that makes both the racism and the NATO intervention and Zizek possible - the Communist definition of ''the Muslim'' namely as a spectral presence that needs to be defended from white Aryanism.

Before Tito made the ''Muslims'' separate, there were no fights between Christian and Islamic Slavs, who all equally shared the burden of Turkish rule and coexisted peacefully with aspirations to build their own South Slavic state: led, but not COERCED, by the Serbs. As soon as Tito created the Muslims, with I underline the purpose of RESTRAINING SERBIAN POWER, the defragmentation of Yugoslavia was set in the pipeline.

When Germany pushed for Bosnian independence they were simply carrying out the plan of Tito's Communist constitution.

Anonymous said...

I will repeat once more:

the Bosnian Muslim NATION was created by Kardelj and Tito's Communist constitutions. Before that what you nowadays call Bosnian Muslims were ISLAMIC SLAVS - Serbs and Croats.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

Dejan I wrote this:

The vast majority of muslims resident in slovenia were born in slovenia, the vast majority (virtually all) in the country of which slovenia was part at their birth, born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence. The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised; they never emigrated/immigrated.

It is in every way correct. You objected to it:

Will you please actually read some history before you adumbrate and embarrass yourself further....There is no such thing as an indigenous Muslim. This has nothing to do with Slovene racism as you justly critisize it, but on the other hand it is your lack of historical knowledge that makes you think Moozlims in Yugoslavia are not only all virtuous and good but also AUTHENTIC.

Your infantile name calling, your vile about authentic and inauthentic people, as usual, and this time added to a display of ignorance of the history of your own country. So now you change your position and claim that I misrepresent you. You do this habitually as a way of entangling someone in an endlessly repetitive and exhausting exchange.

The congregation of practising Muslims in Lublijana are not "mostly immigrants" to Slovenia. There is nothing "inauthentic" or "uneuropean" about Islam; the rhetoric of authenticity is aryanist and disgusting. If you are making an historical claim it is bogus as well as irrelevant; the widespread adoption of Christianity by the southern Slavs took several centuries as you must know and was undertaken by imperial missionaries from a seat of power in exactly the same city (today called Istanbul) as the seat of power of the overlords who favoured and spread Islam among some of their descendants a few hundred years later. Both the Orthodox Christian faith, and the Islamic faith, practised by people in the Balkans, were the result of the influence of people from the (byzantine, ottoman) imperial centre that is today Istanbul. Neither religion is "more native" or authentic to the region. That whole vocabulary is repulsive, but even the historical reality you claim as justification is bogus and cut to fit your repugnant mystic nationalist ideology.

Anonymous said...

Both the Orthodox Christian faith, and the Islamic faith, practised by people in the Balkans, were the result of the influence of people from the (byzantine, ottoman) imperial centre that is today Istanbul. Neither religion is "more native" or authentic to the region.

No, I never mentioned or even put this issue under scrutiny, you are emotionally invested in this issue because you long to be kidnapped by Aladdin and be put in Omar Shariff's Harem as his favorite belly dancer.

The constitutional status of a nation is not based on confession alone, and it is not based solely in confession; as defined by Kardelj and Tito it grants Bosnian ''Muslims'' the right to their STATE as well and it is on this claim that extremist ''Muslims'' in Bosnia started the movement towards independint Bosnia when Yugoslavis started falling apart, ushered in by the Slovenian ''example''. On this same basis the Albanians in Kosovo are right now claiming the right to their own STATE KOSOVO.

The SANU Memorandum, deemed ''nationalist'' by deluded Western Communists like yourself, explained this in detail, so read it.

Are you that stupid you can't understand a simple statement - Muslims are NOT a nation any more than Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Croats are. Why else would they be called Bosnian SERBS if they were a nation???

It is THIS my darling that made it possible for Yugoslavia to be dismantled, for if you'll remember the NATO angel came to protect ''The Muslims'' (Bosnian, Kosovar) from Serbian aggression.

Anonymous said...

born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence.

Being a ''citizen of Yugoslavia'' does not equal ''Bosnian Muslim''. You can be a citizen of Yugoslavia and practice any faith you want, without being a citizen of the bogus independent Bosnian Muslim state which Muslim separatists longed to get. Ergo Slovenia had no right to annul them because they were citizens of Yugoslavia, having lived since birth in Yugoslavia and having held or holding a YU passport; not because they were ''Muslims''. But you accentuate the ''Muslims'' because you are who you are, Lawrence of Sherbertia, the sentimental warrior for the islamic cause. And in this you are about as effective as UN humanitarian aid.

Your reading completely misrepresents the issue at hand. Zizek is a product of Kardelj's legacy, not of the dangerous tee vee cocaculture to which you dedicated so many florid but useless expressions.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

dejan babbling on about how "muslims" are not a "nation" and therefore cannot "authentically" practise Islam in Slovenia will get you nowhere; nobody here believes in mystic nations but you, so you are talking to yourself and the ghost of Tito, which is i guess a slight variation of your usual habit of talking to yourself and the ghost of Stalin. None of this inane ranting of yours can turn Zizek's aryanist lie into truth or the Muslim congregation in Lublijana into "immigrants" nor can it justify kpunk's embellishment which defines practising Muslims across the globe as embodiments of the principle "Tehran", that ahriman to "Washington"'s ahura mazda.

Anonymous said...

and therefore cannot "authentically" practise Islam in Slovenia will get you nowhere;

you evil DIBUK WYMAN, that was nowhere in my claims, if there's still a man left on this thread that isn't completely invaginated by your Communist dildo, they can just read it in my comments. Never felt an impulse in my life to deprive anyone of their right to practise whatever fucking faith they want, but no, neither Bosnian Serbs nor Kosovar Albanians claim any historic right to a state of their own; they are also not any ''nations'', and it is their miserly whining against Serbian oppression that led them to become Austro-Hungarian vassals once again. WITH COMMUNIST BLESSINGS!

They should have stuck with the Serbs in building a strong federation like the European Union where national or any other differences don't matter, only a strong federal market, and we could have gotten the Dutch and the Brits to work on our farms as pig feeders. That's the only thing that ever mattered, and all that Commie bullshit of yours you can only sell to your frustrated American polyannas.

what I'm saying is that your harping on the Moozlims as oppressed by the White Aryan Supremacist civilization is a Commie simplification of the problem which allows the imperialist and the supremacist to do what they do, i.e alternately launch rescue missions for the Moozlims and slaughter them in Srebrenica-type massacres.

In addition you are being exceptionally biased in failing to mention just how many Izetbegovic's Moozlims treated the nonislamic minorities of Bosnia in the same way Slovenes behaved to the local Moozlims. The Moozlims are not innocent, pure, virtuous, WAKE UP BITCH it´s not a fucking Disney movie!

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"In addition you are being exceptionally biased in failing to mention just how many Izetbegovic's Moozlims treated the nonislamic minorities of Bosnia in the same way Slovenes behaved to the local Moozlims"

No I am not being biased; I am simply not an egregious racist freak like you who views "the Moozlims" as a fungible collective agent so that some twenty five year old born in Lublijana supporting the building of a mosque there is racially guilty of deeds of the US client theocratic fascists in Bosnia and mullahs in Iran, just because she may belong in your paranoid racist imagination to a fictional horde you and Zizek call "the Moozlims" and Kpunk calls "Tehran".


And I am not harping on muslims - you, kpunk and zizek are. I wrote about atheists in China actually; you, kpunk and zizek are going on and on about the evil inauthentic muslim menace to enlightenment and yerup and its "authentic nations", and denouncing everyone who does not tremble before this imaginary menace fiendish inauthentic "the Muslims" as secretly plotting with Iranian mullahs to conquer the world and restore the caliphate. I never even mentioned muslims or "the muslims" except to quote or paraphrase the two articles being discussed here, kpunks and zizek's. My reaction to the latter which sparked the former was not about Muslims or "the Muslism" at all; it was about zizek's recycling of old white supremacist canards about Yerup.

"The Moozlims are not innocent, pure, virtuous, WAKE UP BITCH it´s not a fucking Disney movie!"

What fucking 'the Moozlims'? I mean jesus, you three are quite the craven little trio, ranting endlessly about your nightmares of of "the Moozlims" under the bed. There is no "the Mooozlims". Stop whinging and whimpering and shreiking already. You sound absolutely psychotic.

catmint said...

Dejan, I feel that instead of critically seperating realpolitik from the humanism that glosses it you have mixed everything together and concluded that the only real things to hold on to are the archaic pseudovalues of blood and nation. You sound like a fucking Nazi with this "Muzlim is not a Nation". I have neither the inclination or the peculiar expertise to engage in the further humanitarian intervention of trying to talk you down.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"Ergo Slovenia had no right to annul them because they were citizens of Yugoslavia, having lived since birth in Yugoslavia and having held or holding a YU passport; not because they were ''Muslims''. But you accentuate the ''Muslims'' "

you're really delusional. I was refering to this: "Consider the debate that raged in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional controversy simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque?"

You see I am quoting Zizek, referring to "Muslims" in Slovenia, and on this occasion only muslims, as "mostly immigrant workers". He did not on this occasion we are discussing refer to anyone else, because the article, sparked by the "cartoon cartoon crisis" is about your fictional "The Moozlims", kpunk's "Tehran" or International Islamic Plot, though I posted at length about his designating all Slovenians who fall under his definition of non-aryans - mostly ethnic slavs, ethnic albanians and roma, regardless of confession - "non-Slovenes in Slovenia". "Mostly immigrant workers" is an image for an American audience. A whole set of ideas is evoked in that inaccurate phrase - economic migrants, dirty poor probably non white people, who will only be using a mosque to plot turr. He is boasting of how just and decent and generous real, white yerupeen slovenian liberals are to these economic migrants, these "immigrant workers", washed up in this rich developed yerupeen country. He doesn't say it of course but relies on the american imagination to pîcture these people as refugees from the civil war, problem people with nothing, violent or pitiable. The actual people he is referring to are a majority Slovenian by birth, and all Yugoslavian by birth who settled in Slovenia when it was in their own country of citizenship. They are not "mostly immigrants". Indeed virtually none of the Muslim congregation in Lublijana are "immigrants". Now that is the last time I am explaining this to you, and you can now scream and rant about fiendish "the Mooozlims" and "wimmin" and all the other diabolical hordes persecuting you.

traxus4420 said...

chabert, thanks -- i think i am probably just used to this bourgeois anti-bourgois-ism as a pose that wannabes in a number of fields (academia included) are pressured to rely on, and so found his use of theory more of a novelty than a threat.

i take your point about how he uses theory to pitch story ideas with this political veneer -- professionally he sometimes works as a pop critic, this is sort of what he gets paid for (thumbs up thumbs down). actually i've noticed in mainstream pop reviewing an increase in critics justifying their tastes in political language. it is perhaps a result of living in a dangerous, bloody world while being immersed in things that have no purchase on that world even (or especially) when not entirely frivolous.

but because of this somewhat novel situation we're in in regard to the culture/politics interface, i think the idea of cultural decline needs to really be looked at carefully.

i like this offhand comment from deleuze (from an interview with arnaud villani):

"I'm not at all pessimistic since I don't believe in the irreversibility of situations. Take the current catastrophic state of literature and thought. To me, that doesn't seem grave for the future."

traxus4420 said...

"Childie it's a problem because k-punk doesn't want to champion the braindead lumpenproletariat, onion hanging from its ass, unable to read and write and totally insensitive to any culture other than daytime TV"

yes, i am just saying it would be nice if he did a better job of 'educating' them. as it is i think he mainly appeals to ressentiment-laden nerds like himself. at some point one must move on, and leave the weird politics behind.

Anonymous said...

you, kpunk and zizek are going on and on about the evil inauthentic muslim menace to enlightenment and yerup and its "authentic nations", and denouncing everyone who does not tremble before this imaginary menace fiendish inauthentic "the Muslims" as secretly plotting with Iranian mullahs to conquer the world and restore the caliphate

no, though there are extremist ´´Muslim´´ factions who dream of the Muslim world government and restoring the Ottoman Empire, as there are Serbian factions who dream of Greater Serbia, as there are Slovene Aryans who dream of an ethnically pure Slovenia, I WAS NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT. I was talking about the fact that the Communist constitutions elevated Islamic Slavs living on the territory of Bosnia to the status of a nation, which later made it possible for their descendants with extremist inclinations to rave on about independins, calling on their nonexistent historic ´´right´´ to an own territory. The same process you could see in Kosovo and to a much lesser extent Vojvodina. This is among other things because Communism projected a perverted multiculti utopia not unlike the current Yerupeen dream behind which it formented nationalism, actually. The Slovenes were able to pull it off only and solely because of that constitution. But this extends as well to the Izetbegovic ´´Mozlims´´ who were desperate for an independint states in order to protect themselves from Serbian ´´bullying´´.

You see I am quoting Zizek, referring to "Muslims" in Slovenia, and on this occasion only muslims, as "mostly immigrant workers".

Well that´s a lie, they were not immigrant workers, they were citizens of Slovenia and Yugoslavia, and then their citizenship was erased etc. But your continuous use of the term ´´Muslim´´ to describe islamicized Serbs and Croats also simultaneously plays into NATO propaganda according to which ´´Muslims´´ were THREATENED by their Christian neighbors and this is why NATO must support their separatist agenda in Bosnia as well as in Kosovo. The ´´Muslim´´ claim to statehood, over the course of sixty years, generated ´´Muslim´´ nationalism as well. Apart from periods of fascist collaboration in the world wars, the ´´Muslims´´ were coexisting quite peacefully with Serbs and Croats, precisely because they did not see themselves as a separate nation, did not have a POLITICAL AGENDA to pursue their own fate. It is only Kardelj´s Communism, with its ambition to create a melting pot that covered up the privileged economic position of Slovenia and Croatia, and the creation of artificial entitites like Bosnia, Vojvodina and Kosovo, that did the job. So in effect when you emphasize the ´´Muslim´´ suffering you are acting as the mouthpiece of NATO´s propaganda, and together with Leninino you should clap right now as Kosovo is being declared independint... yet another part of the old Yugoslavia separates from the federation.

Because those Albanian drug overlords and pimps really deserve a state of their own, instead of being decimated by the naughty Christian white supremacists.

The imperial project is not stupid. It knows that it can count on YOUR help, the tears you shed for the Orient, and your continued PR service for Titoist Communism.

Anonymous said...

You sound like a fucking Nazi with this "Muzlim is not a Nation". I have neither the inclination or the peculiar expertise to engage in the further humanitarian intervention of trying to talk you down.

Well if you gonna fucking call me a fucking Nazi then I can call you a fucking Rabbit Shitter, but I don´t have much inspiration because so far you have only shown a willingness to consider other kinds of visions, unlike the Marxian Sherbert here, who completely refuses to revise her own.

But it´s a quite straightforward, empirical, testable and legal historical fact that no, Muslims are NOT a nation, or in other words not a nation in the common sense of the word, about which we can debate, but it will certainly include the same parameters that are valid for Serbs and Croats...but a ´´Communist nation´´ created by Kardelj and Tito. Similarly, Kosovo is not and cannot be an independent state, except by violent secession.

Anonymous said...

is racially guilty of deeds of the US client theocratic fascists in Bosnia and mullahs in Iran, just because she may belong in your paranoid racist imagination to a fictional horde you and Zizek call "the Moozlims" and Kpunk calls "Tehran".

this cannot occur simply by extension and I have attempted no such extension to the islamic victims of Slovene nationalism in Slovenia. But the theocratic fascists and mullahs are calling on the notion ´´Muslim´´, granted them by Communism, for their fictitious claims to islamic Aryanism. This is the most important claim they have: that MUSLIM is an independent ethnic entity. If they weren´t able to make that claim, no such thing as a war in Bosnia could ever be possible.

Anonymous said...

yes, i am just saying it would be nice if he did a better job of 'educating' them. as it is i think he mainly appeals to ressentiment-laden nerds like himself. at some point one must move on, and leave the weird politics behind.

well based on Jonquille´s description, you strike me as a sarcasm-laden iPod digital nerd, but since I do not buy into that disgusting American term ´´nerd´´ (as opposed to winner and Superman) in the first place I neither hold that against you, or k-punk.

Anonymous said...

dejan--darling--I have no idea how to come to the aid of your S.O.S. (and I DO mean the desert signal, you are clearly stuck here with 'Same Old Shit', and are frustrated because these are pale, diffuse intellects from Disney World you are stuck with--they merely cultivate squalour and bad social manners to show solidarity with various filths). You see--they consider 'fucking Nazi' to be the worst epithet that can be hurled, but further to believe that everybody else will automatically accept this. But it is THEY themselves who have brought up Nazism as at least a viable alternative to their own COMMIE BULLSHIT, not to mention those who found that 'the center will not hole' since they never even had one as big as Beyonce Knowles...

I've got to go out to Brooklyn shortly, I've recently met several attractive new blue-collar Hispanics (that, by the way, is an invented term in the same sense as Tito's Muslims).

Anonymous said...

"based on Jonquille´s description, you strike me as a sarcasm-laden iPod digital nerd, but since I do not buy into that disgusting American term ´´nerd´´ (as opposed to winner and Superman) in the first place I neither hold that against you, or k-punk."

He is precisely that, but 'nerd' is not a disgusting term, you just don't know all the uses of it. It doesn't mean 'loser' anymore anyway--in case you haven't noticed, our 'royalty' is now nerds mostly--Bill Gates, Ray Kurzweil, George Bush. This was the prophecy of the great film 'Revenge of the Nerds' with Olivier-style actor Scott Baio, a cute little piece of ass who disappeared down a deportalized commodity-fetish.

Anonymous said...

"at some point one must move on, and leave the weird politics behind."

For what? A MILK SHAKE, Eve????

Anonymous said...

Lawrence, this is what k/punk said in that article on Tehran

It is just that I refuse to accept that Islamophilia is the opposite of Islamophobia; I refuse to equivocate between defending Muslims from racist attack and defending Islam; and I refuse to renounce the centrality of atheism to Marxism.

i don´t know the details because i am not INTERESTED in what SWP thinks or does, while i certainly also didn´t jump on kpunk´s call for ´´international Communism´´ either, but it sounds to me that indeed you have completely idealized Islam and are defending it in an idealized fashion. Maybe in this regard it´s hightime you joined a harem.

Anonymous said...

He is precisely that, but 'nerd' is not a disgusting term,

I should say it's a good term, but refers to something disgusting--nerdism is usually a wimp who tries to be cool. This is what the essence of it is. This does not mean a nerd cannot overcome this unattractive desexualized tranny-trash attitude, but he/she usually will not do so. Mistah Dominic, for example, while nerd, is an exception, because very sexy while feeling guilty about it: Therefore, his turn to nerdism and extreme deformities such as Dworkin visits to the Fort Worth Herpetarium to visit Arpege.

Anonymous said...

t is just that I refuse to accept that Islamophilia is the opposite of Islamophobia; I refuse to equivocate between defending Muslims from racist attack and defending Islam; and I refuse to renounce the centrality of atheism to Marxism.

Well, you see, dejan, the first parts are good that k-punk writes, but the 'centrality of atheism to Marxism' is part of what makes Marxism so weak--hence the turn toward Islamophilia. I cannot see that with his 'refusal to renounce atheism as central to Marxism' he has not himself slipped into a Vulgar Marxism himself. No matter--the end result is that Marxism is in tatters, and someone will probably try to assassinate Chavez again, just as with Fidel there were many attempts, but all unsuccessful. I have never been able to figure out quite why: Perhaps the CIA decided to leave him in place just like they 'left Bin Laden in place'? In any case, atheism is of no importance. It is one of many religions, and Marxism is a variant of atheism and vice-versa.

Anonymous said...

"but it sounds to me that indeed you have completely idealized Islam and are defending it in an idealized fashion. Maybe in this regard it´s hightime you joined a harem."{

That is 100% correct. She is a mental defective, and would do well to hide under the veil.

Anonymous said...

"at some point one must move on, and leave the weird politics behind."

just look how he descends into vulgar materialist mud. We need to leave all that fantasy, sense of wonder, all the fun, and get down to the dirty ground. This transcends your definition of nerdy Jonquille and gets more into the area of trailer-trashy. Which reminds me I forgot to add the Best Vulgar Materialist Blawg Award of the Year to the list, where Childie and the Rabbit Shitter will be in tight competition against Lawrence of Sherbertia.

Anonymous said...

"If they weren´t able to make that claim, no such thing as a war in Bosnia could ever be possible."

well the '74 constitution is one thing, or the relation between the Izetbegovic regime and NATO,

but you actually agree about the "indigenous" nature of Ljubljana's Muslim congregation

how do you expect people to react to these foaming diatribes?

"Muzlim is not a Nation" carries the sense Dr Zizek only alludes to, that these people are somehow "ontologically" stateless, a tribe of prophets with burning eyes etc

I don't see why I should police this comments section, but I'm certainly not going to endorse any kind of pre-critical blood and soil lunacy

Anonymous said...

'where Childie and the Rabbit Shitter will be in tight competition against Lawrence of Sherbertia.'

Well, they do try, but as Leona Helmsley said 'I don't think they're an Os-cah Winnah...' It is clear Arpege is going to re-define the meaning of Sweeps Week in the first week of January. That gal knows her TeeVee from a Hole in the Ground. Arpege is Communist TeeVee. That's why it's important to also nominate and force her to win the 'Cultural Product Award.' No, it has to be the 'YEW ESS AAYYY Cultural Product Award.' She must be made to understand that she is an AMERICAN ASSET.

Anonymous said...

but the 'centrality of atheism to Marxism' is part of what makes Marxism so weak--hence the turn toward Islamophilia.

indeed psychoanalytically speaking the Islamophilia might be a fantasmatic compensation for the complete bankruptcy of the Marxian ´´hard science´´ at this moment but on this issue I mostly agree with my hero and cyberpunk icon Shaviro who said,and this is a very liberal paraphrase, that Marxism is only really useful as a critique of capitalism, because Marx´s critique of capitalism is what indeed took place in the past twenty odd years.

But in that article K-punk claimed something much more interesting, namely

The (surely no surprise to anyone) revelations on Long Sunday that Le Trader is a full-on capitalist (but it's OK, she has a good heart, and no-one who reads her can doubt for a moment that the milk of human kindness flows from her every pore) are less humiliating than the way she outs herself as a total naif, innocently unaware of even the first principles of Marxism (what, capital is abstract? You mean that it's not about bad people and stuff?) It now becomes clear why Le Opera Goeur was so keen to reject the attack on populism; she wants to retain the category of the bad capitalist so she can keep open the possibility that are good capitalists (like... guess who).

Anonymous said...

'I don't see why I should police this comments section,'

In that case, you MUST not, not under ANY circumstances. I realize that was just a polite warning...but it was just TOOOOO namby-pamby...

all right, dejan, I hope you feel better now, after all flesh and blood still matters even if catmint carries through his 'policing apparatus', much like Zizek and his 'power grab' by Fascist Hugo Chavez, and which was, I'm afraid, precisely true. But, like Gloria Gaynor, We Will Survive, even if the Fascist Pig Chavez wins in Venezuela, and the hairdressers don't like it all that much...in the meantime, I'm turning off for 4 or 5 hours...

Anonymous said...

I remember that, he first of all wrote "Le Opera Gouer"

Anonymous said...

Yes, but of course I read that from k-punk when it came out, and from which Arpege has never recovered. Agree also with the Marxist critique of Capitalism, but all these sqalour-laden types think that's just apology for neoliberalism. Who gives a shit what they think? After all, Arpege has in this very thread lamented k-punk's 'limited audience'. And she, of course, had none at all till we made her an 'Oscah-winnah..'

Anonymous said...

Jonquille de Camembert, you have been evicted, please leave the Big Brother House

Anonymous said...

but you actually agree about the "indigenous" nature of Ljubljana's Muslim congregation

no that´s what Le Cobra adumbrated out of my comments in order to again hide her ignorance from public view, a mannerism known to me at least since the time Steppling cussed her and left the Parody center in rage. Whatever confession Ljubljana´s ´´Muslim´´ congregation belongs to, they are SLovenian and Yugoslav citizens and were entitled to an inheritance of their citizenship when Slovenia broke away. (But they are not a Muslim nation and as such do not have the right to their own enclave, province or state inside Slovenia.)

how do you expect people to react to these foaming diatribes?

"Muzlim is not a Nation" carries the sense Dr Zizek only alludes to, that these people are somehow "ontologically" stateless, a tribe of prophets with burning eyes etc

No that´s the sense you WANTED to read into it, what I was directly saying instead of perfidiously ´´alluding´´ is that these people are islamic Serbs and Croats who carry the false name ´´Muzlim´´ invented by Commie aparatchiks working in the employ of the Empire.

Anonymous said...

"Le Opera Gouer"

Which would have, in fact, been an apt bit of nomenclature, because in her ability to act as poltergeist at performances of Verdi and Mozart, Le Opera Goeur becomes somewhat more of--perhaps even--an Opera Gooooer as she illegally transforms all it into Cultural Product. I am going to write Garnier Management that I am seriously worried about the lower caliber of performance they have been experiencing, and that it is surely not due to any of their Personnel, whether Metteurs en Scenes ou Chanteurs and Shantuzzes...it is due to Coozes...

Anonymous said...

(But they are not a Muslim nation and as such do not have the right to their own enclave, province or state inside Slovenia.)

this Nations and the rights of Nations is right wing by any standard

but no one said anything about this

Anonymous said...

Jonquille de Camembert, you have been evicted, please leave the Big Brother House

Thank you for your valued politeness, in waiting till I was ready to go out and see if I want to get laid this afternoon.

Anonymous said...

this Nations and the rights of Nations is right wing by any standard

Oh - according to WHAT standard? Communist cosmopolitism? Self-management? But I am indeed trying to show you the emptiness of these tropes. You know the current president of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, is deemed a nationalist by the EU and America because he claims that Kosovo is historically Serbian territory and may not be snatched away from Serbia just like that.

but no one said anything about this

it was not overtly SAID, but I am referring to discussions wellknown to Sherbert and Leninino alike in which they called me a rabid nationalist because I told them that the Albanian populus was not threatened by human rights and wimmin abuses, rather stimulated by Albanian extremists to breed so that in thirty years all Serbs would be expelled from Kosovo and they could claim their historic right to Kosovar territory.

Anonymous said...

Jonquille de Camembert, you have been evicted, please leave the Big Brother House

I´m sorry Rabbit but you have just granted me the right to evict you as well when I deem your contributions to the Parody Center sufficiently rabid. Perhaps this will make you reconsider your friendship with Missus.

I was also by the way referring to k-punk´s critique of the SWP´s idealizing embrace of Islam, the Islamophilia, when I said that Le Cobra has turned the ´´Muslim´´ into a figure of noble martyrdom under threat from white Aryanism. Things just aren´t that simple.

Anonymous said...

"rather stimulated by Albanian extremists to breed so that in thirty years all Serbs would be expelled from Kosovo"

everyone remembers those spam emails selling Cialis, Viagra and Kosovo Liberation Army DVDs

Anonymous said...

'I was also by the way referring to k-punk´s critique of the SWP´s idealizing embrace of Islam, the Islamophilia, when I said that Le Cobra has turned the ´´Muslim´´ into a figure of noble martyrdom under threat from white Aryanism. Things just aren´t that simple.'

Yes, this is the one thing that Arpege and leninininino have in common, and k-punk was right to critique SWP on this, as well they need critique on almost everything, including thuggishness.

A toute a l'heure. Sorry if I was too horrible, catmint. You seem like a nice fellow, I'm sure you were led down the garden path by wickednesses....

Anonymous said...

"You know the current president of Serbia, Vojislav Kostunica, is deemed a nationalist by the EU and America because he claims that Kosovo is historically Serbian territory and may not be snatched away from Serbia just like that."

quite, but the "taboo" that NATO have already violated for various political reasons, is more to do with a consensus about the legal status of sovereign states than the non-legalised territories of "nations". That they have already broken these taboos illustrates that these were always conventions in line with the geopolitical status quo. There is no operative tranhistorical law of the rights of nations, otherwise the Ottoman Empire would have respected the Serb Nation etc.

Anonymous said...

everyone remembers those spam emails selling Cialis, Viagra and Kosovo Liberation Army DVDs

you´d have to explain HOW in a span of less than sixty years it came to be that a good 90 percent of the Kosovar population right now is Albanian. It could be that Albania sent a fleet of storks who dropped the children on the streets of Pristina... or maybe Albanians breed by immaculate conception. Leninino´s explanation was that it´s the fault of the Serbian state - they didn´t provide sufficient facilities, plunging the Albanians into ignorance and poverty. Sherbert agreed wholeheartedly, especially on the issue of wimmin.
This despite the fact that half the Albanian populus fled from official schools, provided by the Serbian state in abundance, to attend illegal schools where Talibani-style terrorists told them to keep away from those nasty Serbs, because one day, in 2008, they will get their independence.

quite, but the "taboo" that NATO have already violated for various political reasons, is more to do with a consensus about the legal status of sovereign states than the non-legalised territories of "nations".

And what are sovereign states but the territories of NATIONS who claim their right to those states by historic inheritance? I don´t understand what you´re saying.

Anonymous said...

There is no operative tranhistorical law of the rights of nations, otherwise the Ottoman Empire would have respected the Serb Nation etc.

Well precisely, but the only ´´ethnic group´´ for want of a better term that didn´t call on such a transhistorical law of the rights of nations were the Serbs - at least if you discount the paramilitary troopers under Arkan and the like - and even in the supposedly nationalistic SANU memorandum this right was invoked only as a countermeasure to Tito´s underprivileging of Serbia with the excuse of ´´decentralizing´´ Yugoslavia and most importantly, with the ultimate goal of building a strong South Slav federation and not of disintegrating Yugoslavia into smaller units. Slovenians and Moozlims on the other hand both claimed their right to a sovereign state on the basis of nation and soil. That is to say they used their ´´nationhood´´ as the chief argument to get their territory.

Anonymous said...

...I had a look at this tday - surely NATO is meddling but its not from any noble sentiments etc

Anonymous said...

There is no operative tranhistorical law of the rights of nations,

and by the way this is by no means a clearcut, simple and easy issue. There is also no trans-historical law of transnational states and their rights to attack nation states. Furthermore you can interpret it so that the rich Western nations exercise nationalism through imperialism, a nationalist imperialism hiding under the guise of socialist cosmopolitism. There is also a difference between NATIONALISM and NATIONHOOD. And you have to consider that Serbs defined their nationhood throughout the ages by their confession, the Christian Orthodoxy, which was a practical consequence of their frequent migrations under imperial oppression. When I say that Muslims are no nation, it is not a nationalistic statement, rather that most Yugoslav Muslims converted to islam instead of being born into an islamic nation state.

Anonymous said...

This will further worsen relations between western countries and Russia, but Kosovo is a symptom of that, not a cause.

I would agree with this, because ultimately the whole Yugoslav game is about getting to plunder Russia´s rich resources, namely, and has been that since the dawn of time. If the seccession can be pulled off as it most probably will be, then the same can be done to the exRussian satellites, and there you have it, the outline for a new Cold War. But this time it´s so much more dangerous, because the stakes are so high.

traxus4420 said...

i know the last thing everyone here is wants right now is a literary analysis, but it seems to me all of you are using the term 'muslim' for whatever you feel like using it for, i.e. to identify each other with marginal political groups. if i'm not mistaken chabert's controversial use of the term was as a refutation of zizek's ridiculous nytimes article. as 'muslim' was the operative term in the piece, 'muslim' came up in the critique. then you (parodycenter) took this as an opportunity to chastise her for using the term to refer to numbers of otherwise differentiated people (and catmint and i for our complicity) while yourself using it to refer to numbers of otherwise differentiated people. you radio for air support, and everyone else leaves, angry and confused.

the question seems to be which identities are most important in which contexts. i was under the impression chabert was using the term because k-punk and zizek did, refuting them by pointing out that in fact 'muslim' does not refer to a single entity, and that to use it in this sense is various kinds of wrong.

in other words, making what i'm sort of naively assuming was your point (i.e. more than just your personal blue balls jihad).

yes, leaving out the use of 'muslim nationhood' to justify violence on the 'muslim' side. but according to both of you, the ideological device is the same -- this 'muslim identity.' the only reason i can think of why violence not related to the incidents initially under discussion should be brought up is for the sake of 'journalistic objectivity,' sort of like bringing up scalping every time you hear someone mourning Wounded Knee. it's a tactic i had thought you (parody center not jonquille) were skeptical of.

traxus4420 said...

also, while you amiably talk politics with catmint (while talking shit about him on your blog), i thought you might find this interesting/validating:

"Someone at the University of Ljubljana told me that they (the Muslims) insist on being recognised as the ‘Muslim nation’ rather than by ethnic identity. I found it hard to believe that any people should reject their ethnic identity and prefer a name that speaks of their faith alone.

Later someone I met in the downtown Ljubljana solved the riddle for me: “The Slovenian Muslims don’t like to be called the Muslim nation. They too want, like the other Slovenians, to be referred to by their ethnic identity. A celebrated 19th century Slovenian poet, France Preseren, called the Slovenian Muslims Bosnjiak. It was the dominant Serbs in Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia that named them ‘Muslim nation’. Slovenia inherited this political label as successor to former Yugoslavia.”

This increased my curiosity. I wanted to meet some Slovenian Muslims to know their views. The curiosity took me to the Islamic Centre of Ljubljana where I met Nevzat Poric, general secretary of the Muslim community of Slovenia. Poric said 90 percent of the Muslim in Slovenia are Bosnjak (Bosnian), 8 percent Albanian and 2 percent come from other ethnic branches of the large Slav family of the Balkan. The Slovenian Muslims are ethnic Europeans having no ethnic ties with Muslims from the rest of the world. He said Muslims in Slovenia did not like to be deprived of their ethnic identity. When a census was taken in Slovenia in 2002, he informed me, the Slovenian Muslims clearly mentioned their ethnic identities. He regretted that the government brochures still referred to them as ‘Muslim nation’ rather than Bosnjak and Albanian, whereas their Christian cousins were always referred to by their ethnic identities: Slovenian, Croat and Serb.

...

The Slovenian situation also made me recall the case of Pakistan, where the state has long tried to impose a politically convenient Muslim nationhood on the ethnically diverse people. The people of Bangladesh were the first to reject that Muslim nationhood. Today the people of the truncated Pakistan, too, are proud of their ethnicities. Clearly, religion - though important - does not compensate for people’s ethnicity. I experienced this firsthand in Slovenia when I asked some Slovenians: “I am a Muslim. Do you think I am included in the ‘Muslim nation’ of Slovenia?” They said: ‘no’. I asked Nevzet Porac the same question. “No,” he said, “you and I are both Muslims, but I am a Bosnjak Slovene - a European. I have much more in common with Europeans than I have with you.” “Yes,” I agreed: “I have much more in common with the Muslims - even non-Muslims in South Asia - than I have with Muslims in Slovenia."

found here

Anonymous said...

if i'm not mistaken chabert's controversial use of the term was as a refutation of zizek's ridiculous nytimes article. as 'muslim' was the operative term in the piece, 'muslim' came up in the critique.

even though she tried to shove it down my throat, i was not talking at all about her zizek article. whatever she says about zizek i agree in advance because i know how much she knows about that issue. i was drawing her attention to the fact that MUSLIMS ARE NOT A NATION. (The illustration you used is quite illustrative indeed.) They were however turned into a nation by Communists, and this is what eventually led to divisions, fights, resentments and then wars in Bosnia. Bosnian ´´Moozlims´´ felt that they should have their own state, namely, because they are now supposedly a separate nation different from other Bosnjaci, i.e. Bosnian Serbs and Muslims. A very similar process, the culmination of which you can witness right now in Kosovo as per Rabbit´s article, took place with socalled ´´Kosovar Albanians´´, who are claiming their separate national identity on territorial and genetic grounds.

Why is this important? Well, because the Empire is using this to hack up Yugoslavia into ever smaller units (and if you look at my blog you will see that even Zizek is getting worried about that!).

The reason I am pissed at both Scheherezad here and the Rabbit is that I had spent around 6 months up to a year TELLING THEM this and it seems they haven´t even read the basic articles, such as the ones on the Yugoslav consitution, the SANU memorandum and the national issue in Yugoslavia. The added insult in Scherherezad´s case being she immediately calls me a nationalist, and deranged, instead of trying to revise her views.

It´s pathetic to watch the Rabbit fall straight into Colonel´s shitter on this issue, really, because the Rabbit is amongst the more reasonable bloggers in the Leftian madhouse.

(while talking shit about him on your blog),

Traxus I already told you that you´re an excellent bitch. This kind of double bind is exactly what you enjoy, and deep down admit it you´re a gossip queen. But the Rabbit shitter only got what he deserved for calling me a Nazi and then leaving the discussion when I challenged his holy vulgar Marxist views.

Anonymous said...

'(while talking shit about him on your blog),'

I've noticed that Childie also sports a 'save damsels in distress syndrome.' They have to be hard Marxists and hopefully not too poor. It's quite odious, but I think he should be considered as a Contenduh for the Worst Westernized-Muslim Cultural Product Award.

In the meantime, go to hell, Childie...

Anonymous said...

Oh and I read something called HYDRA on Scheherezad´s blog where she and kpunk got into a celebrity deathmatch, and it was something like this

K-punk (very polite and keeping his calm): But LCC, I beg you to reconsider... please define your positions...

LCC: (instantly abreacting) Go to Hell you fucking Tee Vee consumer! Go watch some Tee Vee! You´re a taxi! Ridiculous! Pathetic!

I must admit it´s great fun altogether, but Scheherezad´s short fuse indicates exactly to what deep level she knows K-punk has diagnosed her justly on Teheran.

Anonymous said...

Jonquille I should mention that the Empire supports Kosovar Albanians for example, with all kinds of Lenininian excuses like ´´abuse and rape of wimmin´´, even though the Kosovar Albanians, being a major terrorist organization on the order of the Taliban, deserve an equal amount of anti-terrorist measures. (And the rumors you might have heard that there were Al Quaeda training camps in both Bosnia and Kosovo are NOT fabricated)

Yet Madeleine Albright provided such good resources and logistics to the Kosovo Liberation Army that their success is practically guaranteed!

This indicates first and foremost that the main issue for the US government is the foreign policy of new energy conquests, for which they alternately bribe some Moozlims and bomb others, and in this context it is quite probable that the Moozlims who perpetrated 9°11 really did it out of vengeance.

Anonymous said...

It's quite odious, but I think he should be considered as a Contenduh for the Worst Westernized-Muslim Cultural Product Award.

Indeed a good and practical idea, but I would say Worst Islamicized Western Cultural Product Award. I´m not sure though that Childie could ever hope to compete with Scheherezad on this issue, so I´m afraid it will be a formal contest only.

Anonymous said...

Paroycentrum, this was the coversation you're talking about:

LCC: "The vast majority of muslims resident in slovenia were born in slovenia, the vast majority (virtually all) in the country of which slovenia was part at their birth, born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence. The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised; they never emigrated/immigrated."

You: "Will you please actually read some history before you adumbrate and embarrass yourself further; MUZLIM is a term invented by Josip Broz Tito for Serbs and Croats who were forcibly islamicized during 500 years of quite ruthless Turkish rule, you sentimental Oriental cow. There is no such thing as an indigenous Muslim."

...from the first part it's implied that since the members of the muslim congregation in Ljubljana were born both inside and outside Yugoslavia that "muslim" in this instance means "an adherant of Islam" not ethnic Bosniak (whose ANCESTORS were Serbs and Croats converted as much as 500 years ago). Hence there's no need to AGGRESSIVELY push for this unnecessary INACCURATE "correction" and then complain, when you're called on it, that your feelings have been hurt.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

thanks traxus and catmint; he just does this deliberate misparaphrasing or misattribution to put you to work correcting him over and over.

Deajn I wrote this:"just noticed too that the bit of "Tehran" that lurks in Slovenia in that article is othered by Zizek, who takes the opportunity of a NYT piece to declare most muslims in slovenia '"immigrants". It's a sheer lie. The vast majority of muslims resident in slovenia were born in slovenia, the vast majority (virtually all) in the country of which slovenia was part at their birth, born as citizens of the country of their birth and current residence. The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised; they never emigrated/immigrated. They became "foreign" from the pov of the LDS-led state when Slovenia was aryanised and christianised, but they didn't become "immigrants". But in a paragraph they are transformed, with practising British Muslims and all the practising Muslims of the world, into outposts of "Tehran". "

It's perfectly clear what the referent of "muslims" is - those people, practising muslims, to whom Zizek refers in his article as "mostly immigrant workers" trying to build or acquire a building for a mosque in Slovenia. The you start your tribalist shreiking and stupid caricatures and usual routine, I spelled it out for you:

dejan let me spell this out for you.

there is a congregation of practising Muslims in Lubilijana, as there is a congregation of practising Jews, and several of Catholics, and a few protestants. And the christians have churchs for their services. The Jews got a torah recently and opened a synagogue; before that they held services in the home of the rabbi.

the muslim congregation is bigger than the jewish one. they rent halls for their religious services. for thirty years the clergy and administrators of this congregation have been trying to get a mosque built for the dedicated use of this congregation which practises the religion known as Islam.

a mosque, in case you are unfamiliar, is like a church or a synagogue. But for this religion called Islam.

this congregation is made up of really existing identifiable individuals. with birth certificates, names, and everything. They're not figments in fictions you can interpret as you please.

Slavoj Zizek referred to this congregation, those who go to services in rented halls and whose clergy is trying to get permission to build a mosque.

He referred to these really existing people as "mostly immigrants."

It is simply a lie.

The reason he called them "immigrants" is not because they practise Islam. Most of the people whom he refers to as "immigrants" or "non slovenes in Slovenia" practise no religion at all. It is because he and his other ethnic nationalists consider these individuals racially non-aryan.
That is slavs, non yerupeens, from the balkans not "the West".

No one is trying to make an "enclave" of "national muslims" or "Tehran" in Slovenia, you utter ignoramus. A congregation which meets in rented space is trying to acquire a piece of real estate.

And all this diversion and schreeching from you attention seeking ressentimentalistes only serves to obscure and disguise the actual, documented, barbaric crimes, torture, murder, ethnic cleansing, of the Washington/Tehran partnership and their paramilitaries against humanity. Since this happened in your own country it is even more disgusting that your should defend its apologists so ferociously and try to dilute and spread blame around, Zizek-style, to handy diabolical racial and gender hordes, "the mooozlims" "wimmin" etc.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"even though the Kosovar Albanians, being a major terrorist organization on the order of the Taliban"

see there you go again with this racist, tribalist zizekian vileness, dejan. "The Kosovar Albanians" are not a "terrorist organization". The population of Kosovo is terrorised by a US client terrorist organisation operating under the protection of a direct NATO and UN occupation.

traxus4420 said...

dejan, i left that last comment because i don't like to see you get condescended to, even when any reasonable person would agree you were asking for it (chabert and catmint are more than capable of fending for themselves).

but you didn't read what i wrote either. or catmint, despite what you call his reasonableness.

and now you're aping your favorite commie dictator tito and labeling all your blog enemies the 'moozlims,' which is a funny joke and another reason not to take you seriously.

CHABERT IS NOT TRYING TO OPPRESS YOU, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WANT HER TO. IN FACT YOUR BLOG PROBABLY GETS MORE HITS THAN HERS. CARRY ON WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

ahem.

"save damsels in distress syndrome."

isn't that why you're here, prince charming?

the mendacity from both of you is really stunning, almost Bush-like in its total disregard for being repeatedly pointed out.

catmint, i'm sorry for continuing to fan the flamers. that was the last time.

Anonymous said...

"CHABERT IS NOT TRYING TO OPPRESS YOU, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WANT HER TO. IN FACT YOUR BLOG PROBABLY GETS MORE HITS THAN HERS. CARRY ON WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE."

He's got past the primer, and getting missus's style down pat. Is now serious contenduh against his Missus, while continuing to double-agent me by imitating that Chinese who forgave the American loans yesterday.

Anonymous said...

Here Chabert you quoted it yourself - only the article doesn't mention that the entire Muslim nation was concocted for this same purpose (i.e. that Tito wanted to create ''European islam'')

Jürgen Elsässer: The United States wanted, as did Austria at the end of the 19th century in Bosnia, to create a “European” Islam to weaken the Islamic states in the Middle East, meaning, at that time, the Ottoman empire, and today, Iran and the Arab states. The neoconservatives had other plans again: to construct a clandestine network of “fundamentalist” puppets to do the dirty work against “old” Europe.

No one is trying to make an "enclave" of "national muslims" or "Tehran" in Slovenia, you utter ignoramus.

I never suggested that you or Leninino or the Rabbit were trying to build an enclave. Marxism is not inherently racist, but its stupidity lends it vulnerable to ideological appropriation. I said that the Marxist Islamophilia *which kpunk critisized in the Teherean article was playing into the plans expounded by Elsasser. It is because of this Islamophilia that the SWP for example thinks that Milosevic was a ''nationalist'' and that he had ambitions to ''oppress'' the Albanian minority in Kosovo.

that "muslim" in this instance means "an adherant of Islam" not ethnic Bosniak (whose ANCESTORS were Serbs and Croats converted as much as 500 years ago).

Rabbit, this is precisely the problem: IN THIS INSTANCE IT MEANS an adherent of Islam, and IN SOME OTHER INSTANCE it could mean something else. This because the term itself is based on an abstraction, not rooted in any historical reality, political, politicized. Do you finally understand the point?

see there you go again with this racist, tribalist zizekian vileness, dejan. "The Kosovar Albanians" are not a "terrorist organization". The population of Kosovo is terrorised by a US client terrorist organisation operating under the protection of a direct NATO and UN occupation.

Here is an example of the stupidity at work. The population of Kosovar Albanians descends from those brothers and children of the mafiosi that were FORCIBLY brought to Kosovo during the 60 years preceding Yugoslavia's demise. Tito made this possible by granting Kosovo the fictituous status of an autonomous province, which allowed for lax migration laws. They usually came with weapons and or drugs. This is how Kosovo so quickly developed into a Mecca for drugs and arms trade in the Balkans. So there is a long long INTRINSIC tradition of corruption taking place in Kosovo, which means that very many people were born into a criminal ideology - a lot of social engineering. (That idiot Leninino thinks it's because Serbia ''didn't provide them with facilities'' or something.) This group of Albanians, as I had the opportunity to hear from many Turks in the past, is distrusted within Islam and has the reputation of being extremist and excessively corrupt. It is not for no reason that Serbs dismiss them so vehemently - for 60 years all Serbs have ever heard from Albanians was WE WANT OUR OWN STATE. If you're going to explain that away by saying that it's only because the KLA manipulates the Kosovar Albanians, as if they have no brain of their own, then you're patronizing them. A vast vast majority of Kosovar Albanians is in favor of independence. In Montenegro you had a fifty-fifty situation, in Kosovo it's like ninety percent of the voting body is for independence. They can't all be KLA dupes. There must also be a general and overwhelming desire in the population to be their own Volk, and a hatred of Serbs that cannot merely be the result of Milosevic's or anybody else's policing over there. Suggesting in turn that the Kosovar Albanians were BREAST FED INDEPENDENCE. That's how bad it is and anything else is a distortion and an understatement.



But this is probably unacceptable to you because of the Islamophilia: how COULD Moozlims be baaaaad?

Well like I said things are not that simple!

Anonymous said...

Or maybe better to say: even though CIA and then also the US government *Madeleine Albright did lend a lot of support to the KLA, the KLA could not have succeeded as they did without there existing something that this policy could latch on to.

Anonymous said...

and labeling all your blog enemies the 'moozlims,' which is a funny joke and another reason not to take you seriously.

Chabert is not my blog enemy; she is my Arch Blawg Nemesis. The conflict has operatic proportions. You realize that I am an intense Serb, and I don't give my love to anyone just like that. When I encounter a manipulative Diva who seduces me and then scolds me on feminist grounds, trying to pull my friends as well into the malevolent Vortex between her labia, that's just ASKING FOR TROUBLE Traxus. Because of this, the parody will never cease until Missus apologizes for her crimes.

catmint, i'm sorry for continuing to fan the flamers. that was the last time.

yes Traxus, your own flame is more perfidious, perhaps more effective because of that. You sting quietly,like the Black Adder.

Anonymous said...

The country was aryanised beneath their feet, and they were de-nativised;

so Rabbit they were not ''de-nativised'' because they were never a ''nation'', unless what Mess meant was that they were NATIVE to Slovenia, which is different from them being a NATION inside Slovenia; they were unjustly deprived of their citizenship in slovenia and yugoslavia, because they were born there, had passports and property et cetera

but I did not say this in the first place in order to extol the virtue of Blut und Bodem, rather to underscore that the Commie tinkering with nationhood under the constitution to a large extent made nationalisms possible, in Bosnia and in Kosovo alike. When Tito granted all these ethnic groups their ''nationhood'' and ''autonomy'', it was like planting a bomb underneath federalism - the Bosnjaci started feeling themselves separate, the Kosovar Albanians, the Sandzak Albanians, the Vojvodinians, the Serbs in Croatia...etc etc

but where I disagree with k-punk is that we should allow this type of a ''deterritorialization'' according to Marx's supposed claim that one must allow capitalism to reach its own limits in its way. Though I'm sure punk never meant it as an apologia for neoliberalism, it COULD become one. I think instead Yugoslavia should have built its own unique federation using the best elements of capitalism and socialism, eventually growing toward a Balkan federation. Yet again we fell under that famous Balkan syndrome called ''let the neighbor's cow die'' i.e. catering to our petty mutual envy instead of working together, like the Protestants and the Catholics have learned to do it in Western Europe.
And for this we will pay a sorry price, as usual.

the question is really, how would such a federation be possible? What I'm saying here is that Communism did not provide a good formula, or Communism's formula for cosmopolitism has to be revised in some way. It seems to me that Milosevic was primarily betrayed by Communism, because at the moment he was insisting on it nobody in Yugoslavia really cared about it.

Anonymous said...

"You sting quietly,like the Black Adder."

I was pretty sure of this. His 'hiding in plain sight' was bad enough, but I have to make sure he doesn't suggest we meet at XXXcellentDVD...

""save damsels in distress syndrome."

isn't that why you're here, prince charming?"

Dripping in sarcasm again, darling? Methinks not, you KNOW I came to save you in quite the same way as I'VE SAVED TARA!!! I hardly think your Missus qualifies as a 'damsel', so I must have been referring to you as a switch-hitter. So you call me if you ever get your technique together. Anybody that can dance, I say just let bygones be bygones. Until, tra-la-la as Childie gets bethorned by the Rosettes of Academia.

Anonymous said...

Dripping in sarcasm again, darling?

LOL I can just see him drying up from sarcasm like a sushi platter!

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"The population of Kosovar Albanians descends from those brothers and children of the mafiosi that were FORCIBLY brought to Kosovo during the 60 years preceding Yugoslavia's demise. Tito made this possible by granting Kosovo the fictituous status of an autonomous province, which allowed for lax migration laws. They usually came with weapons and or drugs. This is how Kosovo so quickly developed into a Mecca for drugs and arms trade in the Balkans. So there is a long long INTRINSIC tradition of corruption taking place in Kosovo, which means that very many people were born into a criminal ideology - a lot of social engineering. "


My countrymen have many peculiarities, and amongst others this one, that the more you revile them, the less they like you. - Aubrey de Vere, English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds

Anonymous said...

My countrymen have many peculiarities, and amongst others this one, that the more you revile them, the less they like you. - Aubrey de Vere, English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds

Well yeah that's true, and Serbs are certainly as hotheaded as the Irish, but on the other hand the countrymen refused the socialist state's love, so instead of wanting to mingle with Kosovar Serbs, went to illegal schools. And now instead of being divided, which WOULD be the only possible solution, they want to go totally independent.

Anonymous said...

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/michaletos/018.shtml

After the end of the was Marshal Tito deliberately left the borders between Kosovo and Northern Albania open so as to facilitate immigration from the South and in parallel stalled the process of the return of Serbian refugees to their homeland. Thus until 1948, when the Tito-Stalin dispute provoked the former to close down the borders; 150, 000 more Albanians entered Kosovo and significantly alter demographics, once gain.

The post war years were characterized by an explosion of births by the Albanian side that resembled Middle Eastern ethics (Patriarchic extended families, high birth rate, women domestically labor force,) and an immigration of the Serbians further north or abroad. As a result the balance tilted for the Albanian side and since the early 70’s Tito made the Province autonomous providing numerous rights to the Albanians.

The war in 1999, as it could be easily predicted resulted once more in a flight of the Serbian population to the North and a whole host of atrocities committed against the civilians that remained. Between 12/06/1999 and 16/01/2000, 3,491 terrorist attacks against Serbians were recorded and another 110 against other nationalities (Turks, Gypsies, Gorani and Bosniaks)

Anonymous said...

...but you see, Chabert, Marshall Tito did that from a Communist viewpoint. From a Communist viewpoint, indeed why not give the Kosovar maffia the right to even a population explosion, or to exercise what the Greek rightly terms ''Middle Age ways''? Hey, they are HUMANS like the rest of us! From a Communist viewpoint, indeed why not decentralize Yugoslavia? Everyone should have equal power! This is where your opinion becomes self-contradictory. You frown at Slovenian nationalism, a product of the Communist constitutions, but you think that a more gentle, tolerant and so on treatment would have made the Kosovar Albanians love their union with Serbia. But the truth is, Serbia tried just about everything in the past - Milosevic in fact is the only figure in recent history who did not want to assist the Albanians - and right now Serbia is offering wide autonomy. But NO. They want INDEPENDINS, and nothing else will do. Now unless they are really completely brain dead hordes, which I don't believe, I am not going to excuse the Kosovar Albanians by saying ''oh poor uneducated donkeys, they're being brainwashed by the KLA''. I am rather tempted to see them as Slovenians, the islamic variety of vassal mentality - throughout their history they always did what the Empire asked them to do. Albanian ethnography is really a catastrophe, if they weren;t collaborating with the Nazis they were looking for ways to devolve their country even further by having a string of Mussolini-type leaders. Even Romania can't compete with this type of cultural masochism!

Anonymous said...

"Because of this, the parody will never cease until Missus apologizes for her crimes."

Dejan YOU cause all these problems YOURSELF because you want to treat people as FANTASY FIGURES and not as EQUALS. You appear to have no sense of the "do unto others" etc of christianity, or even conventional behaviour. etc etc etc

Anonymous said...

"they were not ''de-nativised'' because they were never a ''nation'', unless what Mess meant was that they were NATIVE to Slovenia"

read the fucking comment: half were born in Sl nearly all in Sl or FRY

Anonymous said...

You appear to have no sense of the "do unto others" etc of christianity, or even conventional behaviour. etc etc etc

You know what Rabbit fuck you too! You're just looking for excuses to project your dirty Unconscious on me, it's like that time you came to Parody Center's shame corner to whine that you shouldn't have published a parody of k-punk. You don't have the GUTS, really. It's safer with the Communists and their sweet lies.

read the fucking comment: half were born in Sl nearly all in Sl or FRY

yeah and? What does that have to do with Missus's sentimentalism for Moozlims?

Anonymous said...

At least Missus has the guts to bite! But you are just a total masochist bottom, Rabbit.

Anonymous said...

this puts it even more clearly, Rabbit

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/michaletos/024.shtml

ANALYSIS
Kosovo a precedent for West as well
By Ioannis Michaletos | Blog
Novemebr 22, 2007

According to the USA Constitution (Article 4, Particle 3), no new State can be created with the division of an existing one or with the merge between 2 or more. For that it will require decision by all chambers of Congress, the Presidency and all authorities. In the small corner of the Balkans; Kosovo, the USA policy behaves in quite a different mode in relation to its own domestic and constitutional ethics. The quest for Kosovo status is a major challenge and dilemma for the Western countries that will have to decide if they want to provide a clear precedent for their own lands whether in Western Europe, the Americas, or in Russia. Countless of minorities, some of them of Islamic heritage would like to pursue a similar aim like the one Kosovo-Albanians are striving for, and it is absolutely necessary for the Administrations across the world to comprehend the perils involved.

In May 1945 Josef Tito issued a decree whereby it prohibited the return of the Serbian refugees that were forced to leave Kosovo during WW2 and because of the Albanian terrorist practices. Consequently, another decree legalized real-estate buyouts that took place between 1941 and1945. In this way the Albanian ex-SS collaborators that had previously acquired Serbian land under false or illegal manners, were able to maintain their freedom and fortune.

Between 1945 and1948 around 150,000 Albanians from the Northern Albania freely entered Kosovo under the policy of Tito into enchasing the ties between the two countries, so as to maneuver a “Socialistic Union” between Belgrade and Tirana and as a way of reducing Serbian influence in the Yugoslav Federation. What is surprising is that this people were officially categorized as refugees and received hefty state assistance that was paid by cutting considerable state subsidies allocated for Serbia proper. On January 1946 local autonomy for the Albanian community in Kosovo was granted by Tito, thus creating the first step for the final division of this historical Province from Serbia.

Quite a few members of the Kosovo-Albanian community became members of the Yugoslav Communist party in order to provide allegiance to their benefactor and at the same time the Yugoslav state secret service “SDB” recruited Albanians for covert operations. From the early ‘50’s until the mid-70’s the Albanians have managed to expand considerably their population three times more the Serbian one. In 1974 Tito proceeded in declaring the whole of Kosovo as an autonomous state within the Serbian one and a multitude of privileges prepared the current situation as it has been unfolded in the ‘90’s

Anonymous said...

"you shouldn't have published a parody of k-punk"

I was just messing about with this - this was to do with Daniel M. whose writing I enjoyed while finding it criticiseable - I criticised him directly but this doesn't mean I disliked him

Anonymous said...

I don't really know what you're about with all this Dejan. Are you stoned all the time or something? You don't listen to what other people say but just indulge in these crazed harangues. This isn't any kind of DIALOGUE and I'm not at all interested in its continuation.

Anonymous said...

Your latest accusation was pure Le Cobra branded Marxist humanism: you don't have a HEART, Dejan, for the poor Moozlims; you are not CHARITABLE. You know very well what the discussion is about, but you don't like my conclusion - the intimate link between Commiedom and Capitalism.

But that's not really a problem in your case. Be deluded if you like, you're not hurting ME by being ignorant. In Cobra's case, if she's going to claim some kind of ProSerbianism, by going on about dr. Zizek's crimes, then I refuse to accept such gross distortions as displayed throughout this thread.

Anonymous said...

I was just messing about with this - this was to do with Daniel M. whose writing I enjoyed while finding it criticiseable - I criticised him directly but this doesn't mean I disliked him

I did dislike him, he was dry and hostile.

But the point is you have an ambivalent relationship to parody, make up your mind!

Anonymous said...

"I did dislike him, he was dry and hostile."

Absolutely True, Eddi...and well said as always...

"I don't really know what you're about with all this Arpege. Are you stoned all the time or something? You don't listen to what other people say but just indulge in these crazed harangues. This isn't any kind of DIALOGUE and I'm not at all interested in its continuation."

Curious how catmint is en colere for the first time I've ever seen him so. Let 'im go watch 'Rififi' and butch it up. That's why Arpege deserves awards in ALL categories in which she may be nominated--she must be continually exposed for her destructive and hysterical policies.

Anonymous said...

Curious how catmint is en colere for the first time I've ever seen him so.

Curious how he is never en colere with Missus... they ALWAYS agree...but never mind, everyone has a right to their objet d'perverse jouissance. What is really pathetic is that he draws so much jouissance from parody, but can't really live with his guilt afterwards. Arpege is most successful with these bottom-type, nerdy Marxists, the lip-biting variety.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

Identical Twins, Slavoj and Dejan:

1. you think that a more gentle, tolerant and so on treatment would have made the Kosovar Albanians love their union with Serbia. But the truth is, Serbia tried just about everything in the past - Milosevic in fact is the only figure in recent history who did not want to assist the Albanians - and right now Serbia is offering wide autonomy. But NO. They want INDEPENDINS, and nothing else will do. Now unless they are really completely brain dead hordes, which I don't believe, I am not going to excuse the Kosovar Albanians by saying ''oh poor uneducated donkeys, they're being brainwashed by the KLA''. I am rather tempted to see them as Slovenians, the islamic variety of vassal mentality - throughout their history they always did what the Empire asked them to do. Albanian ethnography is really a catastrophe, if they weren;t collaborating with the Nazis they were looking for ways to devolve their country even further by having a string of Mussolini-type leaders. Even Romania can't compete with this type of cultural masochism!


2. When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. On the other hand, this misperception is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people are living in the past, fighting again and again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old myths... One is tempted to say that these two cliches should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation...So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to Clinton not as "the American president," but as "the American Fuehrer";... This is where the NATO planners got it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life... [while]the tens of thousands of refugees, burned villages and Pristina turning into a ghost town. Where is the so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to protest THIS horror taking place in their own backyard, not only the - till now, at least, bombardments with relatively very low casualties? ... Although it may fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place.

It is interesting to watch in the last days the Serb satellite state TV which targets foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing; the overall idea is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was not touched by the war raging all around it, is attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals... So when, in the nightime, crowds are camping out on the Belgrade bridges, participating in pop and ethnic music concerts held there in a defiantly festive mood, offering their bodies as the live shield to prevent the bridges from being bombed, the answer to this faked pathetic gesture should be a very simple one: why don't you go to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in the Albanian parts of Pristina?

In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic opposition" in Serbia against the Milosevic's regime, the truly touchy topic is the stance towards Kosovo: as to this topic, the large majority of the "democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West and "betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the student demonstrations against the Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western media who closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the regular slogans of the demonstrators against the special police forces was "Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!". In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act would thus be to unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the "Albanian threat to Serbia."

In the last years, the Serb propaganda is promoting the identification of Serbia as the second Israel, with Serbs as the chosen nation, and Kosovo as their West Bank where they fight, in the guise of "Albanian terrorists," their own intifada. They went as far as repeating the old Israeli complaint against the Arabs: "We will pardon you for what you did to us, but we will never pardon you for forcing us to do to YOU the horrible things we had to do in order to defend ourselves!" ...So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?

Anonymous said...

When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population.

God what a vapid Communist cow you really are.

Milosevic DID enjoy support of the large majority of the population, but as you well know, you snake, Milosevic's policy was never ''aggressive nationalism'' - except from the perspective of NATO, the Kosovar Albanians and Zizek's Heimat Slovenia. Milosevic ran a mixed and opportunistic Commie policy aimed at preserving the Yugoslav federation and restoring some of Serbia's status within that federation *following the SANU document.

By contrast, the policy of the Kosovar Albanians has always been, is, and will continue to be aggressive nationalism aimed at separation and independence.

You will do ANYTHING to avoid the real issue at hand, which is your dumb ''old Marxist'' humanism and Disney sentimentalism vis-a-vis a newer, more modern, structuralist view.

I can tell you only went to the best Halliwud schools!

Milosevic, Zizek, Yugoslavia, Kosovo - all of that fell because of Tito's Communism, you silly old headless Pollyanna!

Anonymous said...

"So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights."

this is the sort of thing I'd classify as "left wing Hayek". & I'm only calling it "left wing" to designate that it overtly criticises rather than endorses capitalism.

(leaving out Zizek who strikes me more as a shambolic magician with only one trick, that only works on the "pseudoleftists" he claims to revile.)

I had a look at some more of Mark K-P's writing and it does have a lot about Nietzsche, cybersurgery and id-chips. But if he means by his theology of capital this kind of left Hayek thing, isn't it really understandable as a spontaneous criticism of what is? Is it only a kind of apocryphal science and no more "dangerous" than Madonna Kabalah? Or is there something else?

Anonymous said...

"What is really pathetic is that he draws so much jouissance from parody, but can't really live with his guilt afterwards"

I think a good joke should be fleeting, like a glass of champagne. If you want I could change the link on the right from "Cultural Parody Center" to "Jabba the Serb".

Anonymous said...

Jabba the Hutt is one of my favorite characters, how did you know that? I suppose you fancy yourself Luke Skywalker or something - that's the really original part of the parody; but alright, as long as I can have Princess Chabert sitting on my lap as I feed her worms and slugs, pulling the chains around her neck on occasion just to keep her tense.

the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights

This is dr. Zizek's Lacaninanization of the issue, not MINE. The New World Order did not breed Milosevic, because Milosevic was not a rabid nationalist. Milosevic was a corrupt Communist.

I come from a mixed family, one side was Communist *my granddad was a prominent Commie politician at the Ministry of transport for a long while before he realized how badly they were stealing, then left the Party in rage. On the other side my family descends from the Orthodox archbishop of a Macedonian province and a rich merchant family who were very Royalist before Communists confiscated their property in the Second World War.

Although I cannot shake off the Communist genes because that's something you just can't do to your own blood, if I was old enough during the civil war I would have sent all the Communists to the Gulag, that's how highly I think of their contribution to Serbia.

But interestingly, my granddad, who spent his later career resenting Communists like the plague, to his dying day would tell me that Milosevic wasn't any crook.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

"I'm only calling it "left wing" to designate that it overtly criticises rather than endorses capitalism."

Yeah and 'capitalism' is actually used simply to mean some vague cultural state of thing, 'modernity' and 'consumer culture'.

"isn't it really understandable as a spontaneous criticism of what is?"

there's a 'spontaneous' element, surely, in the sense that there is a reaction to something, there is a historico-economic determination, which is dominant, but also inherited ideological determinations and preparation, institutional too (the factor of class position) - this is what I meant to highlight by stressing the continutity of a petty bourgeois or clerkish antibourgoisism.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

I mean, what is Nietzsche doing in there? What is the function? Why the Nietzsche flag for this? (and lovecraft and heidegger etc)Clearly there is continuity and reactionary nostalgia even if it's very much opportunistically accomplished from a determined position in a highly self-consciously contructed "now" of "newness". A futurism that is notalgic for a romanticised past's imaginary futures, liberation through technology, its one flavour, targeted to one niche.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

bourgeois progressive history guaranteed as usual by petty bourgeois 'dissident' aestheticism with a few new bells and whistles.

Anonymous said...

one pettyburgeoisism to another pettyburgeoisism at a petty burgeois blawg: the blind are leading the blind...

SUCK your Revolution, Chabert!

Anonymous said...

of course there's bathos in Mark k-P's style, and it's fairly obvious the rules of the game don't stretch to calling your "hauntology piece "hogwarts castle" for instance. He just doesn't strike me as a sub-Nietzsche
character. Maybe Chernyshevsky would be a reference point though I don't know his work. I'm not interested in putting together some kind of "K-Punk" dossier; I don't read the K-Punk blog unless people point out particular things. These are the headings for the imaginary dossier as criticiseable "chunks" of ideology:

"alienation effect"

"art school style"

"contradictions of mass culture"

"freedom inheres in desolation"

"there are twelve real people in the world, the rest are paste"

it's not limited to these, I didn't feel on balance "Decline of the West" was quite relevant. Also Petty-Bourgois dissident is a very elastic category, Tarkovsky, for instance would be in this category?

Le Colonel Chabert said...

Petty-Bourgois dissident is a very elastic category, Tarkovsky, for instance would be in this category?

dunno. But I think petty bourgeois antibourgeoism is not elastic, though there's a lot of variation. What it is is the complaint that in bourgeois society, petty bourgeois men are promised a lot of things - they are promised the liberty, sexiness, admiration, fulfillment, and power over others that only the truly grand bourgeois have, and even they not as much as Olympian gods - but it's false advertising.

but i'm not that interested in kpunk either - i'd rather chat about the narrative strategies of classical political economy and novels. I am thinking to say something about Humphrey Clinker shortly.

What are your dozen favourite novels rabbiteeater?

Le Colonel Chabert said...

("freedom inheres in desolation"

not quite I think:

freedom inheres in other people's desolation.)

catmint said...

I've read nearly nothing pre 20th century. My favourite Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I'm sure is regarded as his most quintessentially petit bourgeois. Pale Fire I found like a cartoon. I think I've just about read twelve novels, so I could do this; "do the meme", and without having to include Stephen Kings. I'll think about it.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

sorry! didn't mean to be impertinent with the kvestchins.

if one were to develop rancière's intuition there, one would first notice that although there are assuredly ricardian realists, and malthusian realists, and smithian/steuartian realists, the most profound influence on the truly top shelf elite realists was Say, because his view of things jibed with their conception of literary production/consumption and literary markets.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

i think the perfect example of petty bourgeois antibourgeoisism, apart from nieztsche, is foucault, whose utopia turns out to be a romanticised ancient greek slave holding city state he transforms into the scene of his fantasy of being a member of the ruling citizen elite. This citizen elite is - much like Sade - the fully realised and fulfilled subject as he should be, that which is cruelly subjected by modernity; he is provided with slaves, wives used as housekeepers and breeding mares, and athletic young boys to rape. This is the crux of this form of critique of modernity. Yes it does notice a lot of things about modernity, but all from this position of the fantasy of blonde beasthood or herrenvolk citizenship, with women back in their place, with slaves to do all the work, with just the amount of naughtiness and peril to sex to keep it exciting, with the only check on the exercise of ruling class power over a majority of others being the delightful personal challenge of self discipline and moderation and rivalry with others of their class.

Anonymous said...

"if one were to develop rancière's intuition there, one would first notice that although there are assuredly ricardian realists, and malthusian realists, and smithian/steuartian realists, the most profound influence on the truly top shelf elite realists was Say, because his view of things jibed with their conception of literary production/consumption and literary markets"

I wasn't trying to be evasive. The relationships between literature and social theory at this time surely would be illuminating. Each illuminating eachother. The thing is don't know the period. Economics very much doesn't have a great books" curriculum. It's the presentation of hypothetical transhistorical models, detached from their theorists. This feeds into the tendency to present reality as an eternal present. With the caveats to this sort of abstraction left in the footnotes. I don't really know too much about Say, Turgot, Sismondi.

Anonymous said...

Foucault I would of thought was an example of the bourgeois learning of Deleuze, Derrida et al. Do you mean some kind of aestheticisation of politics? Also wasn't he conscious of the right wing "drag" of his influences and consciously working in opposition to them. I don't mean, heaven forbid, that he'd "redeemed" Fritz Nietzsche, something like that. Rather that the result's unusual insofar as it's not run of the mill rhetoricisation. His work for prisoners rights was, I think, unambiguously progressive.

Anonymous said...

Or, it may well be that the habits of thought that define utopianism also characterise much of Foucault, but it's not "I want this, this and this" - it's skewed off this a bit

Anonymous said...

...maybe Michel wanted to be a milkmaid or something

Le Colonel Chabert said...

" "I want this, this and this" - it's skewed off this a bit"

in the usual way. "I want this, this" is not really a common style for this genre. The History of Sexuality tho, esp the last two, are fantasies, completely ahistorical and distorting, deeply nietzschean, which bring forward this figure of the erastes - the older male athenian aristo who "woos" the freeborn teenage boy from the gymnasium - as the sole protagonist, who is really free and experiences "true love", and there's no critique at all of the power relations of this relationship or the social order which provides this athenian property owner and citizen with these conditions for his aphrodisia. More of the same emerges also in his (orientalist) commentaries on Iran. The prison project was unexceptionable. I'm speaking of the texts more than the guy.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

he's very locked in to the point of view of the slaveholder/aristo, Sade from the start, who resents the accumulation of checks on his power over others. For example he describes social change which results in the partial emancipation of women from chattel servitude as restrictions on the liberty of their husbands, as a general narrowing of sociality, even though everyone's social liberties and networks expand in this alteration of social order except the household tyrant's. From the start he doesn't see that Sade's liberties, cruelly subjected by various institutions and social forces, are guaranteed by the lack of liberties of the servants. It's accomplished entirely narratively - The Subject is Sade, not his valet and not the girl he tortures. The Subject is the athenian citizen, not his slaves and not his wife and not his paidika. He never really emerges from this inability to see more than one subject at a time, to grasp the social. And also, institutions are dehumanised which disguises actual power - power of people over other people - in order to tell tragic tales of the taming of the nietzshcean blonde beast (he's not, for foucault, meaningfully blonde or anything like that), the landlord slaveholder aristos progressively subjected to cruel norms which restrict their abilities to use other people as they please. That these landlord/aristo/slaveholders have an apparatus of power at their disposal is always disguised - there is an inhuman apparatus which is antagonistic to them only, restricting their liberties; his whole posture of critique of power collapses and vanishes in the set up of these subject protagonists as the authentic subjects, and somehow everyone around them is just naturally helpless and passive. Unaccountably.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

so analyses of institutional control are really good in foucault but context is absent, real power (property) is ignored, and the implicit foil is the sadean castle as a state of nature for The Subject who is it's proprietor and overlord. In this sense the individualist assumption in Foucault is a lot stronger than that of a lot of the humanism he subjects to critique - the tales all remain in the genre of the "individual vs. society". Thus psychoanalysis and the medical profession is chosen as the comparison to church and state for the thesis of the construction of "sexuality", as if there were context for either. From Foucault comes a very smooth historical progression, smoother even than standard "bourgeois progressive history", and the marginalisation and occlusion of everything that doesn't fit. And this occlusion of what doesn't fit happens also to involve the occlusion of class, race and gender. What we get is the history of a yerupeen, male Subject vs Society presented as a history of something much more broad. And in this narrow history of this falsely universal The Subject, discipline steadily gives way to control, coercion to cure, punishment to reform, penal institutions to psychiatry, terror to knowledge, state and class power to biopower, etc.. The implicit association of norms and institutions with the social and collectivities, etc, produces a looming alternative which is always some misty nietzschean fantasy.

Le Colonel Chabert said...

as if there were NO context for either (or as if there were context for neither)

Le Colonel Chabert said...

last thing: in Foucault, although he doesn't articulate this straightfowardly, and does a bit of autocritique on the question, the consistent presentation in his narratives is of kinds of behaviour, punished and pathologised as deviant by institutions, as being somehow more spontaneous and less determined than behaviour socially constructed as normal. He doesn't argue this but he consistently presents "criminal" or "deviant" behaviours as kinds of outbursts of some energies, will, desires which have escaped socialisation and institutional power. This is on the one hand an inheritance from sade and nietzsche also - the way he narrates it - but also a ideological feature of his work, a product of his concrete (class, professional, ethnic, national, "cultural") position and project in particular concrete conditions (national, institutional, political, economic, discursive, cultural, aesthetic).

Le Colonel Chabert said...

And that he was faintly aware of the ideological aspect, a valorisation in a nietzschean/heidegerrian frame, is suggested by his original title for his famous essay on the Iranian revolution, which was La folie d'Iran. The Madness of Iran. And this is a demonstration of the real subordination and obedience of his thought to the dominant ideology - whatever is designated as pathological or deviant is assumed to be some kind of "untamed" liberty to be championed, some atavism or remnant of the socially vitiated vitality, etc etc.