4drubble | Notebook - Utopia, Rhetoric, Magic, Control, Multiplicity

Notebook - Utopia, Rhetoric, Magic, Control, Multiplicity

KIRBYSPACE

Think about the strangeness of today’s situation: 30 or 40 years ago we were still debating what the future will be - communist, capitalist, fascist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophe: the whole life on earth disintegrating because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth and so on. So the paradox is that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism. Which means that we should reinvent utopia, but in what sense? There are two false meanings of utopia: one is this old notion of imagining an ideal society which we realize will never be realized; the other is the capitalist utopia in the sense of new and new perverse desires that you are not only allowed but even solicited to realize. The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not kind of a kind of a free imagination - utopia is a matter of inner most urgency. You are forced to imagine it, as the only way out, and this is what we need today.

Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri

We’re definitely moving toward “control” societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault’s often taken as the theorist of disciplinary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we’re moving away from disciplinary societies, we’ve already left them behind. We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Burroughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they’re breaking down because they’re fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealthily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. In a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don’t explain anything, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for “uni-versals of communication” ought to make us shudder. It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called “sabotage” (“clogging” the machinery) . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

From William A Covino’s Magic and/as Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy

The Romantic effort to reconstitute magic/rhetoric in the Western imagination was supplanted by what DeQuincey recognized as the sterile and non-magical rhetoric of “public business,” with its reliance on “external facts, tangible realities, and circumstantial details” (97, 227). In the post-Romantic modern age, the dissociation of magic and rhetoric seemed complete. I would propose, however, that rhetoric and magic remain synonymous, set in a diminished cosmology. Performing magic has always involved issuing a “coercive command”; insofar as such commands are intrinsic to language, and really do make and re-make reality, we “do magic” when we “do rhetoric,” and vice-versa (Covino, “Magic” 25-26; Burke 5). For the Greek orator, the Renaissance magus, the Romantic poet, and the variety of present-day institutional authorities who invoke a cosmology of sanctioned forces in every act of official discourse, language alters the social situation. Consider, for instance, the especially potent force of performatives, “statements that by themselves create a new state of affairs”. When George Bush issues a performative declaration of war against Iraq, we are reminded that all such declarations, from “I pronounce you husband and wife” to the professor’s “Your final grade is an A” to the boss’ “You’re fired,” are instances in which saying makes it so. In such cases, the speaker/writer performs magic by effecting real action through the “use of existing powerful symbols”. In the event that any of us employ powerful words to change a situation, or are ourselves changed by what we read or hear, we participate in a magical transactive transformation.
What is at issue then is not whether rhetoric is magic, but what kinds of magic/rhetoric produce what kinds of effects. Still enclosed in the Enlightenment privileging of plain, unambiguous maxims, we are too often victims of a repressive magic that limits the possibilities for action. Couliano associates such magic with the hypnosis induced in a “police State,” in contrast to the flexible but inefficient “magician State”:
But the essential difference between the two, the one which works altogether in favor of the [magician state], is that magic is a science of metamorphoses with the capacity to change, to adapt to all circumstances, to improve, whereas the police State always remains just what it is: in this case, the defender to the death of out-of-date values, of a political oligarchy useless and pernicious to the life of nations. The system of restraints is bound to perish, for what it defends is merely an accumulation of slogans without any vitality. The magician State, on the other hand, only expects to develop new possibilities and new tactics, and it is precisely excess of vitality which impedes its good running order.

Within a paradigm that privileges machine virtues such as “good running order,” and values stability and efficiency, the discourse of slogans is the “sorcery” that prevails. The most obvious examples of such discourse come from advertising: in a recent Nike commercial, all of the reasons not to buy athletic shoes and start exercising disappear with the injunction, “Just Do It.” This is the kind of magic that Emig implicitly identifies with current-traditional rhetoric, the magic of authoritarian, simplistic incantations passed from salesperson to consumer, from teacher to student, incantations that identify preferred public discourse as instantaneous, formulaic, and absolute.

Countering such sorcery means disrupting it by employing the pre-Enlightenment magical/rhetorical belief in a cosmology of possibilities for re-ordering discourse and reality, through writing that creates new phantasms, new magic rhetorics.

7th Sep 2011 | 23 notes

Notebook - Utopia, Rhetoric, Magic, Control, Multiplicity