This Is Not A Program
It's perhaps the second hot day of the year, and the Milano opens up to the breeze, the Conjunto joining with the noise of buses and garbage trucks out on Bancroft. Inside, upstairs, an old homeless guy in soiled desert camouflage shuffles from table to table trying to hit on any woman in sight. Upstairs quickly empties.Down Telegraph, in Moe's, I pick up Tiqqun's "This Is Not A Program" (Semiotext(e), natch), full of sentences like:
"Every war machine is by nature a society, a society without a state; but under Empire, given its obsidional status, another determination has to be added".Talk about obsidional (obsidianal might have been better)… Like so much of Semiotext(e), this is writing in love with its gnomic knowing eloquence, writing for the sake of writing, writing written to exclude all but the besieged in-crowd (those who might know what "obsidional" actually means), writing utterly untethered to any sort of reading much beyond the academic fringe (people for whom "May 1968" still seems to be the brightest star to navigate by, for whom "Western Thought" basically means French and Italian leftist writing). I just have to buy it; it'll provide hours of edification and quiet entertainment over the next week or two…
Labels: berkeley, books, life, local, philosophy
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