Absolutely correct, dear David, I could not agree more. But there are tons
of misplaced good intentions involved in this.
Identity politics has exploded because of the internet's hidden deceitful
promise that all children were finally going to get their spot in the
limelight. Which of course never happened because we all have attention
constraints. And being drowned in mediocre floods of cat and baby pictures
(95% of Instagram postings are completely ignored, blogs peaked already in
2006), why is the audience to blame when the flood of junk was so mediocre
to begin with? No wonder people turn to Netflix these days. It was all 99%
fake news like media always produced tons of fake news. Better then to have
quality amusement to death to make it more enjoyable.
So it is wrong to call this a desire for recognition (what an infantile
desire to begin with) but rather a desire for attention that became an
obsession with the distorted supernova called the Cartesian Self. Just when
individualism died and became an underclass phenomenon (the shift toward
dividualism was the successful use of the Internet of course, the
netocratic one).
Class was lost in all this. And as a Deleuzian I then have to decide
whether I go down the drain with Rosseauian identity politics or ally
myself with the real Marxist class struggle. Deleuzians can not escape and
stay in between any longer. Those are my ten cents. I see class as heroic
tribe so I stay the course and work on developing stories about the Heroic
Tribe, which today is to celebrate and lift people up toward the Cultural
Engineer who is the true proletarian of the the 21st century. Which means I
also ally with the masses against the (academic and financial) elites.
Self-pity is a dead end. No wonder Jordan Peterson is huge these days.
Postmodernism was meant as a CRITIQUE. That was the Frankfurt School's
intentions all along. Not meant to kill modernism and replace it.
When that shift happened, when postmodernism killed modernism and became
the de facto ideology of Western Academia, we also lost Marx to Rousseau.
It's the shift from Lenin to Stalin again for all I care.
And here is the blind spot. Postmodernism essentially claims that "all
grand narratives are dangerous narratives, therefore there must not be any
grand narrative." Well, stupid, you just created a rand narrative with that
statement and the most dangerous one of them all, the Rousseuian one.
Unless stopped, PoMo will undoubtedly lead to slaughter. It always did in
the past, so why not now?
Attention-seeking belongs to daycare centers and kindergardens. When
prevalent among grown-up people it should be called its proper name,
narcissism and/or infantilization.
Not that I don't desire variety and diversity like every other decent human
being. But I seek it and I don't need it thrown in my face from
pathological cry-bullies.
Back to Marx! Meanwhile, prepare for Trump round 2. "The Left" has learned
nothing but lost its roots. Next Bolsonaro in Brazil. I'm spending this
winter in Rio.
Best
Alexander Bard

Den fre 26 okt. 2018 kl 10:51 skrev David Garcia <
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk>:

> The emphasis on class and class struggle as the universal category often
> seems to
> operate differently to the cultural politics of an expanding, fluid
> multiplicity of struggles
> around identity and the demands to have specific identities recognised and
> respected.
> Sometimes called the politics of recognition.
>
> There has been a longstanding suspiscion in these identitarian movements
> of the so called 'grand narratives' based on -universal categories,
> principles or experiences.
> A suspicion based on a history which sees adoption of these universals as
> subsuming or
> marginalising the specifities of community and community solidarity on
> which these
> movements depend for their heft.
>
> This is a fault-line goes back to the enlightenment’s unquestioned belief
> in ‘reason’ as the universal
> solvent for all injustice. Whose limitations we might recognise in David
> Cameron’s infamous mode of
> address when chiding Angela Eagle in UK parliament in 2011 with the words
> “calm down dear”..
>
>
>
> On 26 Oct 2018, at 06:32, Patrice Riemens <patr...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> > In a French philosophy class 50 yrs ago this thread would have provided
> a fantastic 'baccalaureat' exam subject, since it encapsulates the no 1
> issue of French philosphy, as expressed in the title Vincent Descombes'
> awesome overview of the same: Le Meme et l'Autre (The One and the Other)
> being the question whether there is an identity between identity and
> difference, or a ... difference.
> >
> > It also epitomize the emptinesss of discussions of identity, this time
> illustrated by a member of Bilwet's famous, but totally vacuous phrase
> "rather a complex identity than an identity complex", completely
> overlooking that the latter is a consequence of the former, not its
> opposite.
> >
> > Alterity is just as bad a carrier of progress as identity.
> >
> > This being said: The Winter Is Coming ...
> >
> > Cheers all the same, p+2D!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 2018-10-26 01:36, Johnatan Petterson wrote:
> >> i have seen isabelle stengers in brussels in 1994 who was dissing
> >> "economy" as the "real enemy" of movements
> >> she was connected with.
> >> the leftish dream of labor never became aesthetic or economic, one
> >> does not contradict the other.
> >> on what basis would economy and aesthetic contradict one another?
> >> economy seems in ari's post like metric.
> >> spinoza seemed opposed to metric (measurement) in his quest for
> >> aesthetic freedom.
> >> how would you plug metrics into the aesthetic (creative) understanding
> >> ?
> >> Le ven. 26 oct. 2018 à 01:07, Alice Yang <alice.lan.y...@gmail.com> a
> >> écrit :
> >>> Identity politics _is_ class struggle. The nostalgic leftish dream
> >>> of labor became aesthetic because it did not include women and the
> >>> racially oppressed.
> >>> On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 6:47 PM ari <a...@kein.org> wrote:
> >>>> The primacy of identity has transmorphed class struggle into
> >>>> ressentiment politics. Generation identity is the bastard child
> >>>> of the
> >>>> failed alterglobalisation movement. If at a time when poverty is
> >>>> the
> >>>> source of wealth you insist on denying the economy matters, you
> >>>> sure
> >>>> inhabit culture, but it's a culture of denial.
> >>> --
> >>> Alice
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