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Introduction toHatred of Capitalism /A Semiotext(e) Reader 2001

Introduction: The History ofSemiotext(e)Chris Kraus and Sylvre Lotringer

Part 1: Sylvres First Dream(June 12, 01 Los Angeles California 7:30 p.m.)

Chris Kraus: Could you tell me aboutthe dream you had last night?

Sylvre Lotringer: What was thedream?

C: The dream about not having sex.Because, you see, I wasdisappointed ... I moved the bedaround here in the room so thateverything could be different.

S: But we were having sex. We werejust, we didnt go beyond thecrepuscular.

C: Crepuscular Dawn. Thats the title Ithought up for the book youre doingwith Paul Virilio. Its very trans ... likea tequila sunrise, pineapple juice

getting mixed up with grenadine. But Ithink the dream was about beingmiddle aged.

S: Let me describe my dream. I neverdream, but for the last two nights Iremember my dreams. In bothdreams, there is a communal situation a big room like a loft or an office,with people coming and going.Nothing is private. And in the firstdream I was trying to make out withsomeone. I just remember the white

sheets pushed aside, the mattress onthe floor. People were passing and Iwas kind of annoyed but somehowhaving sex didnt seem so important.Like in Kafka, The Country Doctor, Iwas looking between people passingby. The bodies themselves were notso important. And then last night, Iwas in another of these huge halls,but I was lying on my back with mysex erect

C: You mean, your penis?

S: Awgggh, I hate the word penis. Assoon as you become

physiological, its not much fun.

C: Sylvre, thats all the fun.

S: I mean, I was like the EgyptianNeedle.

C: You mean, you had a great big hardon.

S: Yeah. And you were hovering aboveme like the sky ...And, how can youpenetrate the sky?

C: That is a beautiful dream.

S: So then, its not just you and me, itwas people moving around doing their

things and I was just trying to do mineand it didnt matter if it wentanywhere or not. It was a feeling ofenergy and presence and there was apoint. You dont always have to try tomake a point

C: So that is the history ofSemiotext(e).

S: Exactly. The Red Army Fractionwanted to make a point, and it wastaken away from them. You can onlytake a disparate action... Disparate

Action/Desperate Action... wasnt thatthe title of your first play?

C: Yeah that was how I met you. Ofthe ten famous people I invited, youwere the only one who came.

S: What was it about?

C: It was about coming to the EastVillage from Wellington, New Zealandand realizing there wasnt such athing as politics any more. In NewZealand I was a teenage Maoist,

working for trade unions ... there wasa working class culture that wasdifferent from consumer culture, whatyoud call popular in France... so wehad that in common, even though wewere different generations. I waswondering how to make sense, ormaintain a sense of politics, in asituation that was inherently chaoticand apolitical. Regretting history. Ofcourse that hardly is a topic anymore.But it was one of Semiotext(e)s bigtopics. Thats why I thought it was

destiny that I should meet you.

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S: I was never a Maoist. I only realizedlater on that in France I had been aStalinist.

C: Yeah, well. How do you talk about

the past without it seeming like anepitaph?

S: Hence my hatred of the penis.Hatred of capitalism.

C: Yeah, but I love dick, ya know?(laughs) What did you think, lookingthrough the book today?

S: I felt that all of it was theory, evenwhen theory wasnt there. It was sostrong. Reading Assatas interview,Prisoner in the United States, mademe think that while were supposed tolive such a privileged life in ourglamorous vacuum it relies on the factthat 1.3 people in this country havejust been put away. And that millionsof people all over the world and inAmerica are paying for thistechnological paradise. Its veryupsetting. But the feeling I had wasalso strength being connected tosomething very important, that hasntdisappeared. When I startedSemiotext(e) in 1974 we were in the

last gasp of Marxism, and I knew theterrorists were right, but I could notcondone their actions. That is still theway I feel right now. What happenedis that we forgot that capitalism evenexists. It has become invisiblebecause theres nothing else to see.When I told Baudrillard about thisbook, he said the title sounded tooold-fashioned.

C: He didnt get the joke.

S: But capitalism hasnt disappeared. I

was trying to disappear for years bydoing interviews, but capitalism hasntdisappeared. Its repercussions areeven more momentous than before,but no one can seem to grasp them.(The phone rings. Its Mark vonSchlegell, who has edited sections ofthis book.)

C: Mark, what do you think about thebook? M: I think its fine. I enjoyed theparts I read. I totally liked it.

C: Yeah, but do you think its historical

or speculative?

M: Probably a bit of both. I think itshysterical. What do you want it to be?

C: I want it to be beautiful. (Markhangs up.) Sylvre, should we move

on to another topic? I wanted to saysomething about this direct,immediate tone of voice we publish inNative Agents. And how it relates tothe entire project.

S: When I was doing a lot of interviewsit was because I wanted theory tobecome ideas, that would have adirect impact. That would be graspedas naturally as you breathe.

C: Conversational theory.

S: Yeah. Interviews were one way ofdoing it. The other was to surround itwith other stuff, til it became part ofsomething more fluid and couldnt beisolated. Documents, images, quotes,ideas being part of some kind ofmovement that takes you from onething to the next, and changeseverything about the world.

C: Certain things need to be said overand over in order for anyone to hearthem. I was reading an essay by JillJohnston this afternoon, about

meeting R.D. Laing. Shed noticed thisenormous leap between The DividedSelf, written in the late 1950s, andThe Politics of Experience, which cameout in 1965 or so, and she wanted toknow how it happened. She wrote: Iconcluded that Laing mustve beenprotecting himself professionally bycoming on as the high priest ofmadness without any direct personalinformation as to how he got thereand I determined to ask him why.She was writing this in 1972, thinkingthat total disclosure on the part ofeveryone is the only way we canunderstand why things are the waythey are. Thirty years later this is stillso radical: disclosures gotten mixedup with confession ... confessionmay be ridiculed but it is basicallycondoned because it implies personalguilt, the first step back towards thefold, some kind of cheap catharsis.Disclosure, the mere statement offacts, bisects reality into cause and

effect. This is much more disturbing.But the culture still considers

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seriousness immune from any sortof disclosure. Laing, or any otherGreat Man, would lose the power ofmyth if we understood how the mythwas constructed.

S: The French avant-garde waslooking for things extreme. Capitalismnever goes to the extreme, and thatswhere you can get it. Can you putmadness to some use? Hatred ofcapitalism is real madness.

C: Well Jill was crazy, and so are a lotof people that we publish. But to me,this idea of total disclosure seemsincredibly obvious, factual and benign.Ulrike Meinhofs manifesto that wascrazy. She was so sensitive to thingswe hardly notice anymore. Thecrippling effects of consumer culture there she was talking about themasses and of professionalcompetition in which she wasobviously talking about herself andher own world. Career is so ingrainednow we dont even question it. Ofcourse, Meinhof was mad. But so isFanny Howe.

S: The Madness of Truth.

C: To think about anything for verylong is delirium.

Part 2: Sylvres Second Dream

(Next morning Los Angeles California 10:45 a.m.)

S: In the dream I had last night I wastrying to hide a piece of paper frompeople who were hounding me. It wasseveral layers thick, like parchment, apiece of text, thick with many layers.A thick piece of paper that I waswearing on me, and I was trying toprotect it from people who wanted tograb it, but however hard I tried Icould never make it disappear it wasbright red and then they wouldalways find it, and I had to fend themoff. Then the paper turned into somesort of living material not exactlymeat or insect life, but made of layerstoo. And it was attacking me and I wastrying to beat it and take pieces offand get rid of it but it would alwaysgrow back, and it was thick and slimy.

I didnt have blood on my hands but Ihad this meaty feeling, that I was

pounding on a piece of meat thatwouldnt let itself be torn away. Youput this book together. What do youthink its about?

C: What I like about the book is that itfeels very seamless that all thedifferent parts of it are pieces of thesame organism. In this sense,Baudrillards hysteria about the end ofpolitics and Louis Wolfsons numericprophecies and Michelle Teasdescriptions of the wan goth kids ofCopley Square and Ann Rowersdruggy memories of Tim Leary circa1961 are all part of the same thing.Eileen Myles asks if shes the onlyperson in the room who cant afford to

fix her teeth and Alain Joxe explainshow genocidal skirmishes arestructurally inbuilt to globalcapitalism. Every piece of writing inthis book is totally polemical. Itsaction writing, totally self-aware that itis paradigm. In that sense, all thewriting in this book embraces thephilosophy of terrorism.

S: At first I didnt want to do the bookbecause it seemed like a first classfuneral. Semiotext(e) never published

any manifestoes; therefore itspreposterous to think that there couldbe any kind of ending or conclusion.

C: It was nice this morning, working inthe garden.

S: Yes, the roses... Pruning.

C: In the place where I grew up, therewere these two older women livingdown the road. Claire and her aunt. Ialways saw them working in thegarden. Claires aunt was very old.She dressed entirely in black exceptfor a straw hat. Which had a blackveil. She was like an ancientbeekeeper.

S: And?

C: Thats how I pictured what we weredoing. (Her eyes mist up.) It was sopeaceful.

S: During WWII we had this longnarrow garden in the distant suburbsof Paris. We were growing rutabagas it was the only vegetable that was

allowed, and every leaf was full of

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brown bugs that we had never seenbefore theyd come along with theGerman army and were devouringevery bit of food we had. But we hadsix beautiful rabbits do you want to

hear the whole thing? We werefascinated by their teeth. I used to putmy finger through the mesh of thecage. They were like lions. Theysnapped off the finger of theneighbors little girl. Do you knowwhat became of them? There was oneI liked a lot called Blackie... he wasblack and velvety to touch and Ithought his twitching nose was full ofwisdom. The rabbits were our foodreserve. Every bit of them was used,my father skinned them, their flesh

turned black again in the sauce mymother made. We knew that Blackiewould turn out that way.

C: So did you save him?

S: No. We couldnt. There was nothingelse to eat. So one day my parentskilled it, but my sister and I refused totouch it.

C: Thats a sad story. But so is NinaZivancevics, about the war inYugoslavia. (PAUSE) I think that weare approaching a Californization ofSemiotext(e). The best part of being in

L.A. is when you can enter this reallysuspended kind of time to just gowith the emptiness and float throughthe day. The texts themselves are lessimportant than the mesh effect thatthey create together.

S: Its like what the magazine wasdoing in New York in the 70s andearly 80s

C: Yes, its more like an atmosphere ofmeaning than any particular meaning.Except there was this guerrilla fashionelement to it then. Part of reading themagazine was always wonderingwhere you stood in relation to the in-crowd. Now its much more open.

S: Thats because theres no morecenter, no more edge. But this book islike a homing head, finding issues thatare urgent in the midst of thisdiffusion.

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