29 August 2004
infinite absenteeism
well, SEP was really a blast this year (much better than the last couple, at least in terms of the papers). Still too much bad Deleuzianism going on ('immanence good! transcendence bad!' This type of 'reasoning' is not eve worthy of first-year undergraduates).
Someone asked about Hardt...well, I don't know what they meant by asking whether his voice is really 'like that'. He sounded like a Californian, slightly surf-y and/or stoned...I dunno.
He looked like an 80s American aerobics teacher.
His manner is altogether far too accepting for someone supposedly proposing the only possible post-Marxist response to 'empire'. He says things like: 'well, you have your concept of multitude, I have mine, that's fine, s'groovy' (well, more or less, he speaks quit a lot like that).
Negri, as far as I can tell, is a little more cutting when he presents this stuff. But it's all a bit problematic - ok, so no one believes in things like 'class' anymore, but just patting everything down (some sort of flat ontology) without any notion of mediation or abstraction is not helpful - I think Virno is more on the mark when he seems to separate out this question, so that you have a conceptual break between the ontology of the human and ontology tout court. Politics can't mean anything unless you do this, I reckon. Agamben and Virno are both working on this problem from different angles (philosophical anthropology against the anthropological machine!), but there's a lot of work to be done in the intersection...you can't just state that 'being is communist' and hope for the best...
Anyway, I am away for a few days, and I think Cinestatic is undergoing some sort of major upheaval, so probably good timing.
I might even go walking, which is unusual activity indeed for Infinite Thought, tho perhaps Nietzschean striding about might be good for the creation of concepts. It's certainly not going to lead to the conclusion that 'all mathematics is transcendence' as some unjustly famous Deleuzian claimed....quelle nuppet!
Someone asked about Hardt...well, I don't know what they meant by asking whether his voice is really 'like that'. He sounded like a Californian, slightly surf-y and/or stoned...I dunno.
He looked like an 80s American aerobics teacher.
His manner is altogether far too accepting for someone supposedly proposing the only possible post-Marxist response to 'empire'. He says things like: 'well, you have your concept of multitude, I have mine, that's fine, s'groovy' (well, more or less, he speaks quit a lot like that).
Negri, as far as I can tell, is a little more cutting when he presents this stuff. But it's all a bit problematic - ok, so no one believes in things like 'class' anymore, but just patting everything down (some sort of flat ontology) without any notion of mediation or abstraction is not helpful - I think Virno is more on the mark when he seems to separate out this question, so that you have a conceptual break between the ontology of the human and ontology tout court. Politics can't mean anything unless you do this, I reckon. Agamben and Virno are both working on this problem from different angles (philosophical anthropology against the anthropological machine!), but there's a lot of work to be done in the intersection...you can't just state that 'being is communist' and hope for the best...
Anyway, I am away for a few days, and I think Cinestatic is undergoing some sort of major upheaval, so probably good timing.
I might even go walking, which is unusual activity indeed for Infinite Thought, tho perhaps Nietzschean striding about might be good for the creation of concepts. It's certainly not going to lead to the conclusion that 'all mathematics is transcendence' as some unjustly famous Deleuzian claimed....quelle nuppet!
