[D66] Confusion to Our Enemies

[A.O.]

Warks's petty-bourgeois play

"“The whole vocabulary of economics is basically a vocabulary of avoided
war.” (107) I always thought Johan Huizinga had a good answer to this
model of politics as the coming together of friends around a shared
substance and in a fight to the death against an enemy. The essential
form of praxis for him is not war but play, and he sees all
institutional forms, including war, as having crystalized out of play.
Play removes from antagonism the necessity for the fight to the death,
and leaves the loser alive to recognize the victor. After all, what is
the point of victory without the recognition of the loser? The Greeks
knew this. It is we moderns who forgot."

http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/mckenzie-wark-confusion-to-our-enemies/

McKenzie Wark | Confusion to Our Enemies
September 25, 2018Bernard Harcourt Leave a Comment

By McKenzie Wark

The Invisible Committee quite possibly lifted their name from a book by
the Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën, Theory of Immediate World
Revolution, from 1958. It proposed a sort of spectral Leninism based on
the contemporary organizing principle of the advertising agency, called
the Imaginary Party. Mariën was an often unacknowledged influence on Guy
Debord and the Situationist International, which also lurks in the
background of Invisible Committee style, which one might think of as a
kind of negative presence in the spectacle.

The most recent text to appear in translation, Now (Semiotext(e), Los
Angeles, 2017) certainly has rhetorical flourishes that descend from
this connection: “We live in a world that has established itself beyond
justification.” (9) Is basically what Debord has to say about what he
calls the integrated spectacle of the seventies. These days one might
call it rather the spectacle of disintegration.

The text begins with a critical devaluation of an already devalued
language. “Having become an instrument of communication, language is no
longer its own reality…” (10) And “The exchange value of language has
fallen to zero.” (11) Against which it asserts as the sole criteria for
truth moments of spontaneous, immediate action: “Truth is a complete
presence to oneself and to the world, a vital contact with the real, an
acute perception of the givens of existence.” (12)


[...]