I know you guys are all riled up, but it would be worth chilling out. As
a reader of this thread I'd like to point out that nobody has either
'won' or 'lost' it, but the degeneration in the tone is a classic
side-effect of the echoing ping-pong of faceless digital communication
where the signal gets more and more distorted. Can the participants
please take a deep breath, have a walk, acknowledge each other's unique
humanity, and then maybe meet in a pub to actually have a civil
conversation. If there is anything we know, it's that nobody gets
anywhere in this movement by treating each other like enemies
Cheers,
Brett
@suitpossum <https://twitter.com/Suitpossum>
On 28/10/2018 10:04, Alexander Bard wrote:
Hahahaha, and there comes the Rousseuian personal attack. Exactly my
point.
There are apparently people so evil and dangerous that the mere
mentioning of their names disqualifies the mentioner from any further
attachment. See Ian's outburst below. Are the gallows what await me next?
While I thought Nettime was s forum for grown-ups - in which case
separating person and opinion (meaning Nelson Mandela may be wrong and
Adolf Hitler may be right on details) - is a fundamental requirement,
Ian wants this to be a kindergarden faux discussion forum for the good
children isolating themselves against the evil children on the
outside. Superiority versus inferiority in the moralist struggle. Sooo
Rousseauian. And exactly what is so fundamentally pathologiocal and
infantile with identity politics. What could possibly be a more
Rousseuian attitude than that?
I happily dine with everybody and anybody without becoming them. As my
great dad taught me when I was five years old. And if The Left may not
even listen to and learn from Candace Owens, Nick Land and/or Adolf
Hitler for that matter, then whatever that Left is, deserves to die
its current slow death into total irrelevance. It is not a proletarian
left at all, it's just a church lady left.
But I'm all for The New Left. A return to Freud and Marx. And I'm
happy my message in a bottle in this forum worked big time considering
how many offlist new amazing contacts my postings created. Nettime is
still very much alive (thank the God who does not exist) even if not
on the mailing list itself.
And Ian, our dear historian of identitarianism Asad Haider will never
attract any masses. Because he again does not have a narrative to
attract anybody. Except possibly for the eternal self-victims that
Marx so grandly despised.
Thank you, everybody!
Alexander Bard
Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 23:46 skrev Ian Alan Paul
<ianalanp...@gmail.com <mailto:ianalanp...@gmail.com>>:
"Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days, race
does not exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely
a rough but not fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of
tribal contribution."
What a strikingly ahistorical, antimaterialist, and ideological
statement. Anyone who finds Candace Owens and Nick Land
salvageable deserves no attention, and certainly no serious
consideration or dialogue. Best of luck with your fantasy of a
pure universal class which exists only for itself as an
abstraction thoroughly divorced from reality.
On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 5:34 PM Alexander Bard
<bardiss...@gmail.com <mailto:bardiss...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear Ian
It's great that you bring up Asad Haider because he is a
brilliant historian of identity politics and I agree with him
that the big shift happened in 1977. But while for Haider 1977
meant a deepening of emancipatory struggle to include feminist
and anti-racist minoritarian causes that he insists were
ignored prior to then, I disagree and mean that this shift was
rather an ideological turn away from Marx straight into the
arms of Rousseau and no deepening at all but rather a massive
loss. The preoccupation became one of medial attention (the
attentionalist call for "has everybody been seen and heard"
rather than the socialist call for "has everybody been given
the means and resources toward equal opportunity") instead of
class struggle proper and has remained so ever since.
Once this dramatic shift of "leftist activism" met with
postmodernism's hatred of the grand narrative as idea (which I
as a Hegelian insist is in itself just another form of
subconscious grand narrative) we ended up with the mess we
have today. Laclau's and Mouffe's hegemonic race to the
bottom. Specialized subcultural struggles "within" rather than
"away from" victimhood with no clear vision in sight.
Meanwhile that clear goal will always be lacking unless there
is a grand heroic narrative that connects the struggles and
lifts up its participants to a tribal and today also hopefully
global whole.
My work is therefore all about tribal anthropology instead
(tribes in Greenland, Botswana, New Guinea and China are all
alike) now moving into data anthropology about contemporary
humans to build a universal story of the tribe in all its
variety and diversity. This is the return to Marx that I
insist on. Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News
these days, race does not exist to her. Neither does it to me.
And gender is merely a rough but not fixed orientation toward
dividual archetypes of tribal contribution. Without any
Rousseuian fantasies allowed on any levels.
Because only class is class and only class har universal
validity. Laclau's and Zizek's dream of the particular
personifying the universal was never more than a wordgame
anyway. It is through shared vision (a fetish as opposed to an
abject) that we can find a shared agenda. Not by distributing
medial attention according to ultimately infantile needs.
Because that's no better than Trump himself.
Best intentions
Alexander Bard
Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 21:27 skrev Ian Alan Paul
<ianalanp...@gmail.com <mailto:ianalanp...@gmail.com>>:
If you you think being of critical and suspicious of
theological metanarratives is intellectually lazy, wait
until you hear about faux-Marxist class reductionism!
In all seriousness, for those of you looking for actually
useful analyses of the complex relations between identity,
class, and emancipation, you couldn't do much better than
Asad Haider's recently published "Mistaken Identity" (
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity ),
which draws on the history of black radicalism to arrive
at some truly exciting answers.
~i
On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 12:06 PM Alexander Bard
<bardiss...@gmail.com <mailto:bardiss...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear Joseph
While you resentfully remain obsessed with my tonality
and my etiquette (as if this was some smelling
salt-driven cocktail party at a ship doomed to sink) I
do prefer to stay with the topic I brought up.
Forget about me. Ans forget about Joseph's
preoccupation with my style and whatever bitter
personal vendettas he is projecting, I'm into the
topic of what the left might or could be. And with
postmodernists ringing alarm bells at any attempt at
creating a grand narrative while the world is on fire,
may I ask, is this all you can achieve? What is that
if not the most mortidinal, death- and tit-worshipping
pathetic anti-narrative there ever was?
It's very comfortable to say "I don't know" but as far
as I'm concerned the answer - while pretending to be
cautiously honest - reveals nothing but ignorance and
intellectual laziness.
However it is easy to see where it all comes from,
this so called "left" has returned to the comforts of
Rousseau's kindergarden fantasies and is more
preoccupied with keeping academic tenure, posing with
the correct virtues, than with fostering and mentoring
a new generation of leftist radicals focused on the
potential of open source platforms toward a
collaborative collective intelligence. The project
that should be and still could be the genuine leftism
of the 21st century. The rest you can read in my books
"Syntheism" and "Digital Libido". Yes, the first one
is about Intelligence becoming God and the second one
is on how we still underrate Hegel and Freud when
trying to understand our current predicament. But it's
all forward-looking and grand narrative-building. As
this is what we need today.
Oh, a great many thanks for the offlist endorsements I
have received the last three days from Nettime
members. However if those endorsements end up in my
private mailbox rather than on Nettime itself, then
perhaps this mailing list is better suited for some
kind of nostalgia for the pre-Trump era or something?
I have that still to figure out. I personally prefer
to looking forward and solving deadlocks. But no prestige.
Deleuze genuinely mixed Nietzsche and Marx, he was an
absolutely heroic philosopher. Totally opposed to
Rousseau. So what do you think Deleuze would have
thought of today's social media-driven victimhood
obsessions? Yes, I miss Nick Land here. We are close
these days.
Best intentions and utmost humility
Alexander
Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 14:24 skrev Joseph Rabie
<j...@overmydeadbody.org <mailto:j...@overmydeadbody.org>>:
Alexander addresses me with an injunction and
second-guesses my answer: "What is your tactic?
Further excuses for not dealing with the crisis of
the left?"
My answer is that I do not have the slightest
idea, and that anyone who claims to have one is
either a liar, fool, or utopian dictator. And
insofar as utopian dictatorship is concerned,
Alexander espouses a "politico-theological
project", a title that has all my alarm bells going.
Indeed, Alexander reduces the complexity of the
world to a sterile, doctrinal dialectic that
denies the sophistication of reality.
I regret being so disobliging, but in my opinion
Alexander's prose is intellectual, political and
literary logorrhoea, in no way conducive to
dealing constructively with the issues at hand.
Joseph Rabie.
Le 26 oct. 2018 à 20:33, Alexander Bard
<bardiss...@gmail.com
<mailto:bardiss...@gmail.com>> a écrit :
Dear Joseph
Yes, I said I made a grotesque simplification.
That was my point. What else is new? Have I
claimed anything else?
If we don't start to see the difference between a
victimhood-driven and a hero-driven left, then
how are we going to spot our own weaknesses?
Where do you start yourself?
Because I'm one of many many leftists who return
to Marx these days since Identity Politics has
become nothing but an endless tirade of
complaints with no creative solutions or
constructive routes up and out in sight. It
really is Rousseau and his tabula rasa idea of
humanity all over again. Moralism instead of
pragmatism. And it has been growing since the
1970's and now dominates whatever leftist social
media we still have.
That's not Marxism. That's a parody of Marxism.
Celebrating the lumpen proletariat instead of
heading directly for what proletarian heroism
could be in the 21st century. No wonder that 95%
of social crowdfunding goes into the pockets of
the libertarian right these days. Leftists do not
even support each other any longer. At least not
for more than three days.
What is your own answer? What ties us together?
Only banal hatred of Trump, or a true vision for
the future, a genuine politico-theological
project that get people going?
Sometimes simplifications do the job. What is
your tactic? Further excuses for not dealing with
the crisis of the left?
Best intentions
Alexander Bard
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