[Reader-list] Residue and english/facsism Part 1

[pratap pandey]

Dear All,

Do permit me to bring together two strands of current sarai reader-list discussion. (1) the currently silent, but still alive, one on 'residue', and (2) the currently begun one on english/fascism (the more crucial question of the novel Naukar Ki Kameez's translation/publication/availability notwithstanding).

In this posting, I take up (1). It opens up the ground for (2), which comes later. [Please don't fall in]

In his posting on 'residue', Mimeticus sought to "complicate" the discussion by positing an/other context within which the notion of 'residue' possessed some (a different kind of, perhaps emancipatory in a different way) explanatory power, a context outside of the "good old Marxist topos of labour". Think about, Mimeticus urges us,

"the kind of collective imaginative work that goes into valorizing many of the commodities and images that we consume. Desiring, viewing, moving through the commodity spaces of the city - all these are a kind of labour, each of them crucial to the possibility of contemporary capital's reproduction, it's self-valorization.

Where is the "residue" now?"

Indeed, where is the 'residue' now, now that we are 'beyond the social', have witnessed/are witnessing the 'fall of the political'? Where is the residue, in the time/space of simulacra?

Perhaps, as Baudrillard puts it, "what is at stake in the masses lies elsewhere". The age of simulations/simulacra is also the age where nobody is, any longer, "in danger of paying the price", where the ethical charge of "paying the price" can itself be dismissed as precisely a retroactive fantasy despondently re/searching for the "spongy referent" called "the mass".

Baudrillard, by invoking simulations/simulacra, seeks to consistently dilute the rigid opposition between nihilism and tragedy that Nietzsche had insisted upon. That is why he never cares to define that "elsewhere" where lies "what is at stake in the masses". [It lies in the end of the social, in a form of knowledge that will never ever refer to itself as truth, will never ever "naturalise" itself, but will always sado-masochistically play upon its foundationalist ambitions; in a method that transforms bewilderment (in the face of image-bombardment, the simulation-army, the self-war) into an ontological (always already facetious) 'fact'. The idea is to re/invoke — re/re/re/re/re: — the tragedy of the reduction of agon to the insistent deferral of what may be called 'the agon question'. Agon, of its very nature, is immune to dispersal (Nietzsche implies). Is the dispersal of agon its very nature? (Baudrillard, in pain, proposes)

To what extent, then, is 'residue' a condensate of ever-dispersing agon? To what extent is 'residue' metonymic of an absent condensate?

Mimeticus asks, pertinently:

Does it exist as a repressed desire, waiting to unsettle the regimes of fantasy that we subscribe to, as readily interpellated consumer-subjects? Or has it become a crucial authorizing component of the valorization process, as the lacuna at the heart of the commodity form compels both desire and doubt? In that case, what would an "alternative" scenario look like? What structure of desire, of imagination would not involve such an ambivalence? 

[Better to talk about Agon. Ambivalence is a reductive experience. It is ultimately an intellectual response to the problematic of 'civility'. 'Civility' itself is an anthropo-historically determined notion: the problem here is that 'civility' always must be pre-determined by a theory of action (praxis, if you will).]

How to de-valorise "masses"? Or 'residue', for that matter?

The answer lies, perhaps, in Jeebesh's response to the discussion on 'residue'. 'Residue' is itself the name of a de-valorisation [whether or not 'caused' by the primitive accumulation of capital, that some say was Marx's way of talking about a (reified) moment of the separation of humans from their means of production, while others say was Marx's metaphor for the gap that capital opens out — keeps opening out in each moment of its (re)production, in affirmation-denial, projectively-retroactively — between 'thingness' and the experience of being fully human]. The process it corresponds to exists neither in full-blown modernity nor the simulacral time/space, but partakes of both/either. 'Residue' is the name of a systematic de-valorisation that blossoms in the tectonic unevenness caused by the over/layering of one master-process upon another. It is difficult to define precisely because its discursive status is interstitial to both "master-narratives" and "grand theory" (and, incidentally, the children Lady Macbeth never had).

Pile up: capitalism/modernity/globalisation/tradition

Pile up: liberalism/socialism/fascism/environmentalism

Pile up: demography/genocide/human rights

Pile up: Smith/Keynes/Amartya Sen/Kant/Hegel/Saint-Simon/Mill (the son)/Marx/Comte/Weber/Adorno/Lenin/Benjamin/Lulu (who's this?)/Whorf/Nehru/Kenyatta/Goffman/Chodu (who's that?)/Giddens/Gramcsi/Polanyi/Dr Google

Where is 'residue' now? Wrong question. It is there, neither as 'precipitate' nor as 'debris'. How to find it? Right question. In what terms? Very good question. Do you have scissors (so I can cut up curtains)? Irrelevant question.

Perhaps we could understand the nature of 'residue' if we ask, along with Jeebesh, the question: what about the footballer nursing a foot ligament injury in the Second Division?

'Residue', therefore, can only be a 'hidden injury'. It is also the name for a 'technology of everyday life'.

Let's break this technology into its parts, for, like nuts bolts cogs gears and crankshafts, it is put together. Let us unfold this technology, which justifies itself by always displaying how it is not folded. Let us unravel this technology: that is any storyteller's primordial fantasy.

'Residue' is: 

Intimately linked to 'confidence', 'self-esteem', 'self-worth', the 'prejudiced' image, 'badge of ability', 'special merit'.

Intimately linked to 'freedom of choice and self-development', 'authoritarianism', 'class morality', 'limbo of non-ability', 'making an expectation become reality'.

Inseparable from 'fair skin', 'hirsute face', 'angled cheekbones', 'muscled limbs', 'terse torso', 'defined abdominals' and 'pert breasts'; 'perfumed armpits', 'gelled hair', 'hands akimbo', 'legs splayed'.

Inseparable from 'who's ordinary and who's a suck-up', 'counter/culture of dignity and freedom', 'solidarity'. 

Inclusive of 'you're there only to get what you want for yourself', 'internalisation of conflict between individual and fraternity', 'inner class warfare'.

Inclusive of 'basic dilemma', 'meaning of integration', 'sacrifice as a contract', 'status by usurpation', 'shame is harder to pass off than guilt', 'doing poorly', 

Existent in 'family', 'provider', 'intermediary', 'pseudo-mutual af/filiation', 'dealing with shaming', 'self-denial', 'shouldering work', 'bill-paying', 'I can do all these things', 'hopelessly contradictory', 'glamour girl', sexy in bed', 'behanchod', 

Existent in 'shaming expunged', moral necessity', 'parental attitude', 'imposing unendingly', 'ascription of weakness', 'parents' life is not a model but a warning', 'exchange relationships', expectations of obligations', 'conflicting codes of love and social competence', 'being seductive', 'good wife', coping with life',

Insisting upon 'images of betrayal', 'apply yourself and study', 'shielded from the influence of the street', pride in accomplishments', 'reflected glory', 'edge on my neighbour', 'Call on me', 'replace society', 'Isn't betrayal the inevitable result when you try to endow your life with a moral purpose greater than your own survival?'

Insisting upon 'superior to other families on the street', 'I always let them fear me', 'great events of my life', 'can love survive in contract?', 'those who are pushed to feel grateful cannot', 'sacrifice is manipulation', 'I work for my money', 'my job is to work for my family', 'I've done some drifting on my own', 'that's what burns me', 'possible chiselers',

'the meaning of acts of self-abnegation'.

'stay respectable', 'is there any escape from my own privations?', 'denial of anything a decent person does', 'destroyer of her own power to believe and hope', 'rebels at any interpretation', 'empty of meaning', 'hack around'.

'the anger many feel springs in part from the same root', 'such people as co-workers', 'personal insult; travesty of the social order', 'like you are part of the woodwork', 'like they have got no self-respect', 'in rags almost', 'living it up', sacrifice is the last resource for individualism', 'sacrifice is the last demonstration of competence'.

XX: 'social genesis of feeling', 'every bigot asks that question', 'but what would you do yourself?', 'I would die!', 'Society is ignorant, okay?', 'next door to them', 'venture tentatively', 'What thing?', 'a hidden silent authority had a kind of magnetic pull', 'announce yourself as a bigot', 'putting something on', 'eagerness with which', 'pattern of a lifetime experience of proving oneself', 'silly uneducated way', 'contest for dignity'.

XX: 'developed their minds think that', 'in both cases', 'only wanted to win the approval of an outside authority', 'became blind to feelings in the process', 'I am praised; subterranean fears of betrayal and shaming are set in motion', 'you assert a common humanity?', 'higher social positions to admit the worthiness', 's/he now feels the right to condemn individuals', 'operate along the same lines', 'the class-system of authority and judgement-making goes into hiding by itself'.

XXX: 'true consciousness', 'personal dignity', 'validation of the self', 'react or act', 'first become legitimate', 'ability to fight against limits', 'it is palpable', 'before you just do it, feel it', 'what is the purpose of demonstrating one's ability?', 'respect others', 'someday no longer having to work', 'open to anyone of talent', 'claim of careers, scarcity of rewards', 'feel inadequate', 'love cannot be earned', 'transpose that self-defeat', 'final reasons', 'good, solid workers', 'the productive activity'.

XXX: 'which we shall try to show', 'we do not mean', 'we cannot prove it directly', 'we do not mean we encountered', 'Rather
', 'this dilemma embodies a classic contradiction', 'the issue here obviously transcends', 'any number of vital matters',

'Yet beneath all these complaints'. 'Idea of destructive replacement'. 'What is stimulating the ordinary person to play?'

finis

To this list [for 'residue' can only be listed, it cannot be explained, just as its construction cannot be explained {and the social construction of the semantic attitudes listed above, and some excess (residue)}] I want to add just one more word.

It is the word that joins 'residue' to english/fascism.

This word is: 'disarticulation'.





yours,

pp

 



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