Adam Drury Response Paper 10 November 14, 2011 (turned in 11/28) English 653: BFS, Prof.

Jim Holstun

Some lengthy remarks on seriality, silence, speaking, and the Riot. Today, wrote Brecht in 1933, injustice goes with a certain stride,/ No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers.1 With time, however, tyranny has managed to metamorphose itself. No longer drawing its power from the silencing of the oppressed, domination has developed an impressive knack for making its opposition talk, for making it chatty. In more formal/phenomenological terms, Capitalism has shifted the focus of its imperialism from the administration of the world itself to the seizure of the worlds mode of disclosure. Indeed, this shift is what seems to me to be the single most signicant development of the past three decades since Iran in 1979 in the neocolonial process called globalization. Among the most tangible examples of this seizing of the worlds mode of disclosure a truly transcendental oppression is what Alain Badiou has called the phenomenon of Western inclusion. 2 According to Badiou, and it is easy to agree with him here, this phenomenon was highly visible in the wake of the Tunisian riots that would go on to spark the revolutionary upheavals we now call the Arab Spring. Recognizing the lack of an armative declaration by the rioters in the early days of the Tunisian revolts I will return to the exclusively negative character of the Riot shortly the Western press was quick to respond by saying that what the rioters were expressing was quite simply a desire for the West, for neo-liberalism and parliamentary democracy (as the twin forms of sociopolitical organization most suited to the globalized expansion of Capitalism). In short, the radical appearance of a desire for liberty is spit out (by the West) as a desire for the West: that riotous negativity should depose a despot and come to an end in elections i.e., the political Norm invoked by the West is for the Western media the ineluctable process of the political activity in Africa. In the terms of disclosure I have deployed above, we could say
1

Brecht, Bertolt. In Praise of Dialectics, available at http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=226%3Ain-praise-of-dialectics&catid=135%3A11-whybrecht&Itemid=294&lang=en

2

See the translation of his January 19, 2011 seminar What does Change the World Mean? available at http:// wrongarithmetic.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/alain-badiou-on-tunisia-riots-revolution/

that the capitalist West took as its primary concern the seizure of the political appearance of the gure of the Rioter in the concrete-practical situation of real riots; the political appearance of this potently negative gure was managed and rerouted into a mode of disclosure e.g., Western inclusion that made the Rioter speak where there was where it heard only silence. It made the Rioter speak the language of the desire for the West. But this ventriloquism on the part of domination is complicated by its play at another level. It is not just that the Western media made the Tunisian Rioters negativity speak, but that this speaking is recongured as the ground for the existence of the Rioter. Todays tyranny only recognizes as a truly existing opposition the opposition that is wi#ing to speak, which means of course to speak its language. In this conversation, the listener imposes the terms, not the talker; if the talker fails to speak the language of the listener (the West), it is simply not recognized as legitimate political opposition, and the justication for its swift, violent, material elimination is not long in coming such opposition does not in fact exist from the perspective of the State. Further evidence of this shift from the silencing of opposition to allowing opposition to speak (on certain terms, of course) is found in the massive attention that social media (read: Capitalisms newest colonial adventure) was given during the Arab uprisings. The rapid, global deployment of these networks is obviously fueled by the cybernetic and biopolitical wet-dream of total homogeneity and synchronicity among the social/public disclosure of its citizens. In its self-congratulatory statements that Facebook was a leading medium in the uprisings throughout the Arab world a belief contradicted at every level by the reports of those who were actually there3 the Western press merely betrayed its need to attribute the cause of a political victory, one which nowhere mentioned Western liberties as its goal or an aim of its actions, to a mode of disclosure (e.g. Facebook) amenable to the Spectacular management of political appearing. We can deploy a Sartrean vocabulary to analyze these realities. Seriality is a mode of disclosure. What this means, given that the (bio-political) administration of its own collapse
3

Kandil, Hazem. Revolt in Egypt. New Left Review 68, Spring 2011. cf. p40. Furthermore, to the extent that Facebook was used in the early moments of coordinating the uprisings, the type of actions endorsed by Facebook groups were primarily modes of protest that involved staying in your home, while it was clear that it was the power and number of people in the streets who made the difference. Here, it is even more clear that Facebook immediately presents itself as a form of inertia against the fusion of a collective into a group. It sought to keep people in the seperated, alienated atomization.

is the only justication left for its going on, is that capitalist totalization must sew, wherever possible, serial relations of reciprocity. Now Sartre makes it clear in CDR that seriality as such is the default structure of any collective or group whose unity lies elsewhere, such that everyone is the same as the Others in so far as he is Other than himself (260). What characterizes our contemporary moment, however, is that this default structure of seriality is what the police-apparatus (media included) actively seeks to extract from every collective action that suggests a potential for the transcendence of seriality, in order to then turn that extracted seriality back against the collective as an external negation of its movement. In other words, commodity dominations defensive reaction against a possible political threat, whose basis is always the threat of the dissolution of seriality, is to take the ground out from under the collective action by making the inertia of its seriality not something it negates internally and with its own resources (giving rise to a fusion), but something externally imposed that demands to be addressed, that demands of the collective that it speak (again, on the listeners terms) in the authorized language of serial relations which are the only social bonds recognized by domination. As an example, one can quickly point to the OWS movements. In the statement, We are the 99%, we can detect an eort on the part of the collective to eace and transcend the seriality which composes it and that at the same time makes said transcendence its explicit aim. The unity of the collective, that is its formation into a group, is not achieved through an action, but embodied in a statement which declares the dissolution of seriality on the basis of an external threat. Just as Sartre describes how during the events leading up to the Paris Commune the negative order of a massacre and the troops who were to carry it out provided the totality, which was experience by everyone as a [possible] negation of seriality (354), we see that the OWS statement establishes a 1% as a threat to a 99%, such that the 1% provides the totality which negates (possibly) the seriality of the 99%. At the same time, reactions against the movement were always characterized by an eort to extract the seriality eaced by We are the 99%! The movement was constantly attacked for its lack of specic demands, despite its being composed of a multiplicity of rather specic demands, and for its internal antagonisms: drummers vs. others, anarchists vs. liberal dems., its multi-class composition, etc. Even The Daily Show took to ridiculing OWSs de facto spatial distribution of castes of protesters throughout the park in clearly

demarcated zones. Here we can see how the internal inertia of the groups serial composition is extracted and returned to the group as its external negation. That the movement (at least in NYC) stalled so suddenly and dissolved itself without serious struggle at the rst police eviction order merely indicates the extent to which the group had been paralyzed by the constant demand to address a seriality which it had attempted to transcend from the outset. Besides these peaceful protest occupations, the other model of political negation seen more or less ubiquitously today is that of the riot. I have discussed some of this above. Let me simply restate that the ubiquity of the riot is a symptom/sign of the fact that commodity domination has made the disclosure of seriality its principle weapon in its war against the people. What characterizes a riot, according to Alain Badiou, is that in calling state power into question it exposes the state to political change (the possibility of its collapse), but it doesnt embody this change: what is going to change in the state is not pregured in the riot. As a distinct form of collective action, the riot seeks to transcend seriality not by fusion but by an indierence to reciprocity, which makes the whole problematic of seriality and fusion irrelevant. Instead, the discontent and precariousness which potentially groups the collective is denied any structure, because it is unable to draw its force from a shared idea (Badiou). Indeed, Sartre describes the fused group by saying that this type of group (a homogeneity of fusion) produces itself as its own idea (CDR 363). Here, in the riot, fusion is certainly impossible, but the inertia of seriality is removed as an obstacle, and all that is left is a pure negativity, a riotous refusal of things as they are.