Frére Dupont vs Chuang

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anon (not verified)
Frére Dupont vs Chuang

Frére Dupont vs Chuang

The part that is as advertised, like that comment under clickbait videos which provides the timestamp to what's mentioned in the title and/or pictured in the thumbnail image.

https://www.lettersjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Iamnotchuang-p...

pages 47-52

"The communist response to the accelerating general tendency to expel labour power from the productive apparatus, and the sequence of emergencies by which this is being realised, has been, with one or two exceptions, disappointing and inadequate. As an example, the lauded Chuang commentary on Coronavirus as an event in class relations does not succeed in drawing a specifi c communist quality from its sociological framing.

Whilst Chuang gathers up content that is otherwise scattered - it is not in itself successful in making itself remarkable. By conserv-ing a C20th style of academically informed journalism it selects a readership that is by and large professional . The information it conveys is that which is useful to social managers and PHD students in the present moment. The class most prominent in the communist milieu, by directing its access to institutionalised capital, also imposes the procedural form, and its preoccupations as content, as the stuff of communist thinking.

By retaining traits of institutional objectivity and the motifs of expertise, it facilitates its own promotion and consumption as a signifi cant communist text within the serious theory market. It also triggers the marxist habit of assigning authority by displacement and deferential citation - the individual marxist is characterised by his strategy for controlling discourse through his legalistic deployment of authoritative texts as precedent .

The Chuang commentary has worth at the level of ‘if you only read one, then this is it’. But it remains within the journalistic param-eters of third estatism and has no subjective core.

For this reason, it is unclear what use it is to its intended readers... it defends an abstract space of marxological correctness but it is stuck at the level of ‘portrayal’ that it seeks to overcome.

If it has adopted the old fashioned mode of the serious essay, it shows no evidence of knowledge of the similarly old fashioned traits and devices of Twentieth Century exercises in willed subjectivity, not only does it not demonstrate an awareness of Theatre as Plague or Cities of the Red Night , it does not show facility with fold-downs, jump cuts, tape loops, automatic writing, oneiric or compulsive reference, detournment or collage - the basic manoeuvres in the performative arms race of self-alienating consciousness.

These, and similar other, outmoded black magic tricks and musty parlour games are the only authentic mechanisms by which subjectiv-ity is retroactively accessed under conditions where subject, history and communism are all constrained by their belonging to that order which has already passed into history. Chuang shows no evidence for its own derangement, it is neither mad nor drunk. Then, how could it tell its readers anything? By what phenomenological means would it ever gain sufficient exteriority to fi nd things out?

Theory must allow itself to become of unsound mind , and chopped into shards, if it is uncover the true stuff. As an example, whilst Chuang comments interestingly on English warehouse generated diseases in the post-mercantile era, it does not talk of the inherent theatricality of the Black Death, nor the eros of Biblical plagues... but it is precisely these exhilarating punctuations of historical form, when considering the dislocating power of viral systems on host environ-ments (where products attack production), that should become the compulsive objects of communist consciousness.

In other words, the Chuang commentary lacks a pataphysical/hyperstitious/noumenal component and for this reason the old neo-kantian racket of Nick Land is still in advance of communist thinking around the machinery of contagion because the former places a subjective content in the hands of its readers outside of the academy - it is this watchamacallit, Dark Enlightenment , and not the communists, that has masqued up and thereby captured the poten-tial for generating avant garde forms.

To its credit, right at the end of the text, Chuang raises the subjec-tive possibility of a ‘surreal war’ against society itself but this small fl y emerging from so massive a maggot is actually where we are already, that surreal violence is the level of our day to day existence. That so fat a maggot should culminate in so small an emergence as the idea of surreal war , is just the way of such processes, everything else could have been cut away as it is just the sort of formulation that should have been situated at the core of the text and which would have taken Chuang way off script. Similarly, all the experimental material I have amassed here, is almost all deadwood, I could easily discard all the cards in my hand for the one or two accidental phrases that still amuse me.

Current iterations of ultra-leftism (Chuang, Endnotes, Commune) work directly against the kinds of improvisation necessary to the movement of consciousness. For the sake of a compelling thirst for realisation, their aesthetically realist presentation of communism is inconceivable except as a funnel trap, or as a further exaggeration, of the ideological categories of the leftist continuum - as if ultra-leftism signifi ed a surplus, or extreme, leftism to which it might provide mercurial leadership.

The compromises necessitated in the throes of realisation sickness have resulted not just in populist manoeuvrings (Commune magazine is essentially a communist content within a corporate frame - complete with the voluntary taxation method of its fundraising) but also the dilution of critique through attempts to metabolise bourgeois categories of left identitarianism.

No communist project should ever have aligned itself with analyses that identify capitalism as patriarchal or even racist, as this inevitably contradicts the specific quality of total critique which identifies capitalism as a self-revolutionising system of indirect relations mediated through representations (including, but not reducible to, the representations of gender and race).

The characteristic realism represented as the real struggles of real people which constrains leftism in practice as the realisation of the left wing of capital, has spread to contemporary communist projects which seemingly cannot now extricate themselves either from the trap of solutionism, or the trap of deference to the expert class generating such solutions - as if a public health crisis is best countered by a public health department .

The function of ideological realism is specifically the denial of registers other than that defined by the productive contradiction, as if that required any further affirmation - one of the variants of the recent leftist turn of communism, fully automated luxury communism proposes the present productive apparatus minus work as its system-immanent solution, but as capitalism is already accelerating away from living labour, this wretched return to the Second International’s affirmation of objective pressures immediately decomposes into an apology for the momentum of dead labour as such.

But theory’s purpose was never to identify a set of plausibles or exit points as alternatives to the present state of things, nor to supply vital information to the revolutionary front line, nor to rehearse truth as the proper standpoint of the minority. Theory is nothing but the transient state of willed subjective excitation in the world and record-ed at the level of ideas - its only external goal is to induce symptoms in its readers, and thereby trigger the host’s immune system response. This is what Artaud is referring to in the text, Theoretica as Plague .

Theory like plague catastrophises two bodily processes: thinking and breathing. The theoretician desires to both elicit, or rather spread, a violent response in consciousness, and interrupt ordinary breath-ing patterns, to the point of inducing a state of hypoxic reverie in amongst its readers.

To this end, the ultra-left, as a pro-communist, exegetically constituted minority, had, up to this juncture, refused all alliance, carrying out its work precisely in terms of the theoretical critique of leftist categories as functions of assimilating recuperation and through this, positively asserted its refusal of the given form of all struggles even as they shifted leftwards . Whatever it was, the ultra-left was against it - including intensifying class struggle, and revolutionary upheavals. Every object, no matter how preferable, expresses the present state of things and should be engaged on terms of its viability as a vector for ideology.

Ultra-leftism had no relevance but as the negation in theory of the immediate form taken by the reproduction of the world through the mechanism of class struggle. Its current failure to understand the disconnect between itself and leftism inevitably degrades its conception of communism which increasingly resembles the set of potentialities that are orchestrated by the times and communicated by the managerial sub-class of professionals to which so many communists belong. Communism has no more, and perhaps less, relation to this set of exits proposed by the left wing of capital than it does to the forces of reaction, or at least to the relations of personal domination to which reaction now refers.

Communism is specifically a return to direct personal relations, that is relations not mediated by the exchange of representations, which is, by definition, impossible through any historical sublation of capitalist productive forces as these are characterised wholly by their system-immanent tendency towards abstraction and its supply of the relational basis of representations.

As a consequence of the contemporary failure to articulate anti-realist registers of engagement, and under present conditions of state emergency measures, communists have relinquished all discontent to right wingers, conspiracy theorists, neo-reactionaries and traditionalists whilst leftists have not only drawn communists further into acquiescence before state exigency but leant them their ideological hostility to autonomy, the discourse of freedom, refusal and opposition on the pretext of maintaining the solutionism attributed to the expertise of the state’s social health apparatus.

The spectacle, for example, of left anarchists making Thatcherite arguments against the oxygen of freedom as a reactionary talking point is now so routine that it has become unremarkable in a circumstance where the critique of everything has degenerated into the policing of bourgeois good thinking and as the old slogan had it, vote Bernie without illusions."

The pages that precede the extract from part one speak about covid-19 pandemic, 5g among other things. Part 2 speaks of BLM, recent protests in Portland and 3:

https://www.lettersjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Iamnotchuang2-...

https://www.lettersjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/iamnotchuang3-...

anon (not verified)
this is pretty embarrassing.

this is pretty embarrassing. I feel bad for people in England though, they can't even go outside or hang out in groups of more than like 6. must be hard.

anon (not verified)
Wow, it's interesting how

Wow, it's interesting how here they're bitching at communist academics while that I Am Not Chuang text is the most absurd load of over-pretentious academic-like gibberish ever written since Emile.

anon (not verified)
It's fitting that monsieur

It's fitting that monsieur dupont split into two equally middling boomer political cliches:
1) failed joycean novelist
2) pale worshipper of the mythic noble savage

anon (not verified)
Indeed... can't deny how

Indeed... can't deny how commies get always more fucked up as they progress. Look at D&G for instance. Even if I cautiously dig their writings, they basically were academic pimp lords, who drew some nerds into getting on with sexy young liberal female students they also fucked themselves. "Claire Parnet" look it up. Classic #MeToo shit.

8BaL!L (not verified)
WOIT TYHE FYUCKL FUICKON

WOIT TYHE FYUCKL FUICKON DUIPOMNT ASDSHIÒLE FUIVCK U U FYUCVKON POIMPOUYS YUOS FYUVCKIN FUICKL DIER DIES DIET DUIT DIE!!?!,

622/2 (not verified)
Anyone care to tell me what

Anyone care to tell me what half of monsieur dupont is going on about in this convoluted and jargon-laden jibber jabber?

Afaict they seem to have an issue with this Chuang group being academics and uses academia-babble that only fellow academics will understand. Is Frere Dupont self-aware or do they just really love to use a thesaurus and obfuscation? I tried to read the links, but it was too pretentious for my taste. If you can't dazzle them with brillance, baffle them with bullshit.

anon (not verified)
All the butthurt chuang

All the butthurt chuang commies making tears while chad frere dupont flexes bigger brain. Based.

anon (not verified)
'Commune' has one foot sunk

'Commune' has one foot sunk up to the mid-calf in identity politics, and gives off an air of stale coffee grounds in a grad student lounge. So as 'ultra-left's' go, that aren't really all that.

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