LE SYSTEME DE LAW, PART DEUX

Let me get this straight...Madoff is in jail for running what in Europe would be called a European Financial Stability Facility, or Euro Rescue Vehicle? Could we get a Nobel Prize winning economist to explain the no-doubt subtle but important differences to us numbnuts, please? We'd really like to invest in this stuff...

THE VIRTUAL TRANSNATIONALIST

"For many national citizens, the practicalities of residence and the ideologies of home, soil and roots are often disjunct, so that the territorial referents of civic loyalty are increasingly divided for many persons among difference spatial horizons: work loyalties, residential loyalties, and religious loyalties may create disjunct registers of affiliation."

A few more thoughts on OBL before he vanishes again into the ahistorical.

Impure spaces. Capital no longer requires the “technology” of the nation-state. Why, after all, should power be made to flow through the ancient and constricted aqueducts of the fabled Hegelian state?  There are now many contenders for the post-statist impure political space, but the paradigmatic community of this sort is the internet, i.e. the real home of Bin Laden, the virtual culture-hero. 

So what sort of rhetorical battle was Bin Laden fighting? Was it the old anti-colonial/anti-imperialist battle of 1945-1989? Was he a political fighter, or a peculiar type of baudrillardean image specialist? A creature of western security agencies? Or a Dostoyevskian nihilist? All of the above. He’s a baffling nowhere man:  a rich Saudi playboy fighting his family’s chief benefactors, the Sauds, living most of his adult life in exile by launching an apparently quijotic war against the ghostly spirit of the United States, which no longer exists in a certain place, in any case. A titanic battle between virtualities.

At its most utopian, Islam preaches a sort of “withering away of the state” through a perfectibility of human action, an ideal community without need of either despots or ulama: the ummah. That utopian sense was lost in the chaotic maze (from the outsider’s perspective, naturally) of Islamic jurisprudence, which was perhaps a necessary conservative move to protect Islam from its human tendency to fragment and schism along tribal lines.

Mirrors: labile terrorism imitates airmobile capital; It is inconceivable without it. Mammon too has his utopian ummah, which exists above and beyond its political and financial structures.

BAD COUNTRIES!

These days, even a child can see how nicely the IMFication du monde is progressing. National sovereignty, which once was a, perhaps THE guarantor of capitalist prosperity is being consumed in the process of Jüngerian Total Mobilization, like Verne's steamship consuming itself in Around the World in Eighty Days. It's funny now to see the rhetoric of moral failure placed on the obliging western states as they struggle and fail to play the rigged game.

As a corollary: Given the rise of these zombie national economies, under the control of Papa Docs hither and yon, how long, I wonder, will rational economic actors pay (in taxes, in patriotic spirit or conscription) for the past incarnation of a state, or perhaps for the future promise of one?

THE PERPETUAL COMPANY OF THE INDIES

Capital-Image needs a master image to inspire circulation. It is best if such master images -- those obsessional phantasies -- reside in some faraway and slightly poetic place, like Mississippi, El Dorado, China, or Louisiana.

Mais la vassalité de ce système à l'État français, en lui demandant de prendre à sa charge les dettes des finances françaises, et la spéculation qui se joue sur les actions de la compagnie de Law vont finalement en ruiner le système.

John Law, the great poetic genius of modern finance, to help the wise and progressive Regent renegotiate an onerous war debt, bypasses and camouflages the paltry capital-image of the Sovereign and creates this incredible fiction, an economic machine infernale, based on a shiny future that never could be -- that stupefies nearly everyone. For a brief moment, in this frenzy of credit and new liquidity, Law is master of France. He simply didn't have the time to buy everyone off, and tie it all into Le Système.  No one ever does. Its economic viability notwithstanding, Law's system served a defining purpose in the spectacular realm, when it became the visible and enigmatic "soul" to the vanishing body of the Sovereign (which was undoubtedly strengthened after its' collapse, and Law's exile...) a lesson in diffusion and legerdemain, that all states now have internalized without question.

Price manipulation is not out of character for Law. His writings from during and after the System are replete with justifications of coercion in the better interest of people, such as the statement that "it was necessary to use authority and induce the people to contribute to their own welfare" and a commentary on John 5:6 to the effect that "some sick men refuse to heal". Although he is commenting on the coercive measures taken in early 1720 against gold and silver, he probably saw price manipulation as a way of helping people help themselves in spite of themselves.

The question, when there are angry mobs on the streets, is inevitably what to burn. The answer, then and now, is always: oneself.

THE SPECTACULAR CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN

"I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first... It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction."

The interesting thing about how these little Stakhanovs function in the spectacle is that they have to walk a dangerous and non-sensical line which is beautifully represented by the Damien Hirst-lite hoodie.

A complete creature of the spectacle, drumming away in his room, waiting for the moment to APPEAR and be recognized as a citizen demigod.

And then suddenly the Ragged Dick thing gets EXHORTATORY, recycled and fed back into itself, his story is displaced onto yours and the subject is frozen into a permanent loop.

The Inspiring True Story of an Ordinary Kid 
YOU discovered.

"He's such an inspiration -- he came from such a small town -- he gives us hope."

"He's living an extraodinary life, but he's just like you or me..."

"There's gonna be times when people tell you you can't live your dreams, this is what I tell 'em: never say never."

BANZAI!!

To use a John Milius metaphor:

The public's attention is one of Nimitz's strike forces, a phantom, position unknown, and a blockbuster is a kamikaze attack -- in other words, a move of beautiful desperation.

Between them is the whole ocean.

Asked about the soul of Hollywood,
I would say
That it is
Like wild cherry blossoms
glowing in the morning sun.

MATTER IS A DRAG

The further away from use-value, and thus its material conditions, a thing is -- the more gravitational suck it has in an economic system --

and therefore, the more money that can be made from it. 

Matter is a drag on capital-image.