Consecrate for Change

I sat down to write tonight and couldn’t get anything out because I was feeling so gloomy. I couldn’t quite figure out why, but then I listened to some music like:

Gobbledigook

Triumph of a Heart

Then I realized why I was down:

A) I haven’t been listening to enough music lately.

B) I have been taking myself too seriously.

Here’s something else from Badiou, this time from his book Polemics, from the chapter entitled “On Parliamentary ‘Democracy’:

“The vote does not bear on capital questions, which are instead presented consensually by politicians as comprising simply what exists, and not as that which is decided (hence it is said: ‘it’s the modern world’, ‘the world as it is’). Similarly, certain decisions have to be taken in secrecy since they are not conservative enough to withstand the test of the vote. In other words, if important changes take place they do not do so in the field of the vote. Inversely, that which is in the vote’s field is on the whole inalterable. What fascinates and brings about adhesion to the procedure of voting is this guarantee of a decision without object.
On the other hand, a politics encompassing real decisions, I mean emancipatory decisions, is entirely foreign to the vote, because by deciding something liberatory you are designated as being hostile to established interests, interests that, despite being int eh minority, will make enough of a hullabaloo, and will have sufficient control over the instruments of propaganda, to ensure that you’ll be replaced at the next election. And this will be all the more readily done, as people vote to persevere and not to become.

Linking politics to real decisions, those understood not as adhering to the nature of things but as consequences of a will, can only be done by submitting politics both to principles and to practices that depend directly on such principles, rather than to the very strange rule that submits everything to a count of votes.
The vote is in essence contradictory to principles, just as it is to every idea of emancipation and protest….

…the principle of principles, for the modern philosopher, is the principle of equality. Inventing sites and procedures of a political work internal to the popular masses; reviving the word ‘worker’ so that the generality of the maxim of equality is applied throughout every situation (workers’ hostels, factories, streets, cities…): this is our problem at task. What is needed–and we should be in no doubt–is a firm indifference to posts of state and a constantly sustained cordial scorn for electoral prebends. What is needed is a serene and declared supremacy of the active number over the passive number. What is needed is the wax Ulysses used to eep from yielding either to the songs, or to the sirens, or to the blackmail of ‘democracy’. What are needed are new paths, since the key to inventions is what, in teh 1970s, was called la liaison de masse, which essentially means: doing politics directly with those it is made for in the first place, those for whom only the maxim of equality is capable of inscribing existence in its truth.”

An interesting article. Badiou compares this spectacle of financial crisis to a Hollywood blockbuster. What’s really real in this whole debacle is not the nail-biting bankers, nor numbers flashing across screens, nor the lighting fast legislation bolting through governments, but the people who can no longer afford to house themselves watching the whole thing on someone else’s TV. The audience is the real, not the spectacle.

And when we look at the audience instead of the show, we see it was all a sham to begin with.

“So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? We see, and this is what it means to see, simple things that we’ve known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.”

Once we admit this fact we can begin to imagine and practice other types of economies and politics. Read the rest of what Badiou has to say here.

I’m done! I defended my thesis this morning and passed. I felt pretty good going into it, but there was a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that my professors might walk in tell me my thesis was total crap, throw it on the ground, spit on it, set it on fire, spit on me, and then walk off to read a real book to purge their eyes of the imbecilities they had just been forced to behold.

Luckily that didn’t happen. My committee suggested some revisions, but there was neither spit nor fire.

I should be posting more frequently on here now, so check back from time to time.