Thanks.

Is this text in the book?

meta-critical: critical thinking that is self-reflexive in its operation.

anamnesis: learning as the recovery of the forgotten.

We online viewers are not getting the needed volume.

Again, the miking: for the online attendees, care please--even the three on the stage.

Are you far from St. Johnsbury VT?

 Marx would have been amazed by this development of communications that allows the streaming of such a conference simultaneously across the globe. Its an amazing example of the power of technology that allows a young socialist (such as myself) to follow a debate between the leading contemporary theorists of Communism (as an idea) as it occurs. Indeed I find it amazing. SIMPLY AMAZING!  Its an excellent modern representation of the power of productive and communicative forces - and how they can be harnessed for the struggle for revolutionary social change.

Nevertheless this massive power of capitalism to  expand communications is something Marx recognised. Indeed he saw this as a vital development for the success of building not only practical unity between workers but also fostering discussion of ideas and perspectives (as the participants are doing in this conference). It reminds me of a section in the Communist Manifesto - when Marx is talking about the link between the unity of workers and the improvement of worldwide communications: 

"This union (of worldwide workers) is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years". 

Thus the importance of communications to the success of revolution is vital to understand and harness for us today. In Marx's time the tools for revolutionary communications were the steamship and telegraph. For us today  (alongside traditional communications) they are the internet, the online forum and the streamed conference. Such technology is the key to the basis of building understanding between workers across the globe - as can be seen by their use in the Arab and Greek Revolutions! Thus I think such streaming of radical conferences,  the greater dispersal of radical ideas and the utility of communications for revolutionary ends is a key weapon that we have in building greater discussion and action for radical movements today. 

Thank you Verso and the participants! 

A bunch of EGS faculty and alum and students are working with me to create an education platform to support this "affinity" moment of global revolution (stated January 2010) called N+1 Academy.

We launch 11.11.11 with Avital Ronell (details TBA). Plans for NYU campus.

All are welcome.

Listening to Zizek last night and Bosteels this morning  one cannot but note the elephant in the room, the traumatic real  that cannot be  named or discussed-- Michel Foucault and his much abused and misunderstood model of biopolitics. This is evident in Bosteel's discussion of Augustinian disciplines of the body and confession as the production of the first modern subject,  and his discussion of the foundational terror that underlies  liberal democracy already dissected by Foucault In Society Must be Defended, But this theoretical amnesia  was even more profound in last night's debate on necessary communist state violence where the Foucauldian perspective of a biopolitical reduction of political personhood to a biologized, commodiied and weaponized body cross-cutting neoliberal democracies, and  instituted Marxist states was never mentioned. The exception to this was when Zizek declaimed "I hate Foucault!".  Zizek's  renewed faith in communist organization after his earlier professions of being a "Chrisitan Materialist" still does not propel him to develop a critique of the state form that could  account for or counter  that advanced by Foucault. Nor could Zizek distinguish between the inceptual conditions  for " excusable" state terror under Stalin and  the continuation of  this terror beyond the duration of those conditions, during WWII and afterwards nor its replication in Eastern and Central European Communist regimes after WWII. This is not to repeat another stigmatization of Marxism via a  crude reduction to Stalinism. Foucault's genealogy/archeology of biopower and the statist administration of life and death at least embarks in this direction of a critique of state form whether Stalinist, Maoist or neoliberal, though he too can be critiqued, but that is a far different project than the sheer structural forgetfulness instituted in this conference too date. Today Balibar went some way to correct this silence around Foucault.

//Foucault's genealogy/archeology of biopower and the statist administration of life and death at least embarks in this direction of a critique of state form whether Stalinist, Maoist or neoliberal, though he too can be critiqued, but that is a far different project than the sheer structural forgetfulness instituted in this conference too date. Today Balibar went some way to correct this silence around Foucault.//

I think what you describes goes beyond "structural forgetfulness" but the necessary erasure of memory that I still associate with any and all utopian ("new beginning") modalities of thinking. I also couldn't agree more with how you staged this séance . 

Were you by any chance at the Lacan, Inc. event last year? If not, someone at the Jack Taper attempted to bring Foucault into the conversation in a similar manner.

Why do you think Foucault is receiving such little attention in critical theory around communism and corporate communism these days? What would Foucault have to offer OccupyWallStreet? I've been thinking a lot about Camus, Sartre, and Foucault these days.

I ask these questions as both meditation and provocation.

As per your other question, their is no critique of the state form at the conference, their is still the assumption that seizure of a centralized zone of power is the royal road to revolutionary transformation which means we have yet to hear a strategy to engage transnational corporate power. Note the nondiscussion of anarchist perspectives, of Ranciere, Castoriadis. Zizek only identifies critique of Marxist models of the state with liberal critique.

I am gingerly in asking this question because i believe in a certain kind of suspension of empirical impulses and giving in to theoretical experiments.

From an occupied Toronto,

Chris W

From an occupied Toronto,

Chris W