<nettime> homeless intellectuals of the world unite

["stephen beard" <stevebeard@easynet.co.uk>]

What follows is a response to Pit Schultz's Nettime post of Jan 27:

Robert C Thomas' invaluable essay Whatever Intellectuals on the figure of
the homeless intellectual speaks for a whole lost generation consumed one
way or another by the ideological struggles of the 1980s. The author quotes
Giorgio Agamben on the plight of "belonging without presuppositions", a
post-'89 formulation which takes its departure from the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the Tiananman Square protests and by referring to an existence
without either relation (exit here from Marxism and its privileging of the
class relation) or identity (exit here from postmodernism and its capture
of the post-'68 new social movements) goes on to posit a subjectivity
defined by a "whatever singularity" (connection here to the profane
illuminations of gnosticism).

It seems to me as an old Baudrillard-head that this singularity is deterred
by the received continuities of the dominant symbolic order and that the
homeless intellectual as a result of risking being reduced to nothing is
challenged to refuse to be put to death. He or she cannot exchange the
tezma (cursing power) attributed to them and can only have the luck to
sacrifice this negative mana on terms of their own choosing. One line of
escape from this "bewitched crossroads" (Theodor Adorno) effectively
converts the philosophical into the aesthetic and turns the intellectual
into an artist... This at least is one of the indexes of failure available.

Thomas links his discourse on the homeless intellectual to the figure of
Jack Smith: "Whatever does not exist is important." He should know. Here
was a man who deliberately and pre-emptively wrote himself out of the
account of queer aesthetics. He let Andy Warhol steal his best ideas (eg
"superstar") and trashed his worst work as soon as it was made. The fact of
his sacrifice demonstrates his exit from the origin/end of cultural history
and reminds us that "the dead man revenges himself" (Jean Baudrillard).
Meanwhile the abject remainders of this sacrifice - in the shape of Smith's
stills and Flaming Creatures, the one film a curator managed to wrest away
from him - are free to periodically (re)enter history on their own terms.

My own appendation to this discourse lies in the figure of Jim Thompson.
Here was a man unable to exchange the manuscript of his great American
proletarian novel Always To Be Blest because... there's no market for
Depression literature/hobos don't read/this is clearly the work of a
schizophrenic. So he tosses it from a bus window as he enters New York and
turns himself into a hack novelist instead. His posthumous reclamation
during the 1980s took off from the survival of his vision in a number of
fragmentary thrillers. He was inevitably misrecognised ("misogynist!",
"nihilist!", "romantic!").

I need only add that a forum like Nettime - as a condensed figure of the
democratic possibilities of the Internet - is always in danger of being
placed in the position of either departing too early (AOL eats the Internet
some time soon) or arriving too late (the homeless intellectual of the
1980s had to chalk his thesis on the paving stones of the street). So let's
hope this perpetual present is redeemed for as long as it can be...













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