Rogueish
01/25/12
On FULL COMMUNISM-
cursory notes on the evolution of a memetic non-demand.
You hear it everywhere, these days, if you walk within a certain activist milieu. It’s a token demand, a given. FULL COMMUNISM- I wouldn’t get out of bed for anything less. It’s a joke, a dumb joke. It’s a communist meme. Like all good memes, it’s pretty much devoid of meaning, in terms of content. But its use denotes something else– a Zizekian uber-demand, a demand which goes beyond. FULL COMMUNISM is both a lack, in a very real sense, but also a pointed lack, its very meaninglessness a cry for meaning.
On the fascinating UK ultraleft meme economy.
What do you mean, "doesn't work"?→
03/14/11
I don’t think communism failed and I think that there are important ways that the Soviet experiment succeeded. In fact, I actually don’t think that radical leftists really think that the Soviet Union failed. I think that this language of failure, picked up from capitalist mainstream culture, covers over a more fundamental anxiety, namely, that communism succeeded. In other words, the left isn’t afraid of failure; it’s afraid of success.
Leftists really fear the bloody violence part of the Russian revolution and the Stalin period. At the Taking Control conference (and in his contribution to The Idea of Communism volume), Peter Hallward is quite great on this, emphasizing the legacy of anti-Jacobinism and the historical legacy of a preference for condemning some kinds of violence but not others. What is condemned? The violence of the people, the violence of the people fighting against those who would oppress them. State violence, the force of counter-revolution, is taken to be at some point justified and permissible. Revolutionary violence is condemned, over-condemned, infused with surplus condemnation.
inventing the pain of others: david foster wallace’s kenyon college commencement speech « ads without products→
03/28/10
Isn’t there something oddly solipsistic about David Foster Wallace’s suggestion that the only way to avoid a solipsistic response to the everyday indifference of others is to imagine that they are in the middle of tragedy or drama? It seems to me a kind of communism of boredom would be a preferable response.
