Re: Thoughts on coups

[d . garcia]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt  
wrote:


‘The unthinkable has to be thought.’ Sean Cubitt

‘An eco-state’ Brian Holmes

The wretchedness of Covid has gifted one important good. It is easier to 
*think the unthinkable* as the unthinkable has already happened. The 
revelation I’m referring to is not the pandemic (that was extensively 
pre-mediated) but rather to the extraordinary degree of latent human 
agency exhibited in the response.


The trouble is that we are in immediate danger of frittering this new 
knowledge away in our rush to snap back the old normal. I don’t want to 
sentimentalise the plague but it has radically opened up our sense of 
what we are collectively capable of.


If any serious individual in late February had argued that under 
conditions, other than war, that wealthy technologically advanced states 
were capable of shutting down 80% of the global economy, furloughing 
large swathes of the workforce along with 1.4 billion students and in 
the process bringing mass air transportation
to a grinding halt, the proposition would not just have been dismissed 
it would simply not even have been heard.


As the usually sober and measured political economist Helen Thomas 
declared in a recent podcast "We have to face up to the fact that we 
have been through something, as a world,.. that in some sense was beyond 
our imaginations
in the west at the beginning of this year." The appearance of this 
degree of agency lead the other participant in the discussion, Adam 
Tooze to declare this to be -THE shock discovery of 2020- “hands down, 
flat out, the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened in modern 
economic history.”


All of which forces us to ask whether or rather how the same level of 
agency can be made available to address the far more profound and 
existential threat of the climate emergency? And why is it that in 
comparison with Covid the ecological crisis yields little more than a 
collective shrug of the shoulders ?


On the surface the reason for this is obvious. Covid is an imminent 
threat of death. Everyone rich and poor alike has been touched by the 
virus in some way. In comparison the threat to life through climate 
damage appears diffuse and distant with the gravest risks in the short 
term likely to be bourn by others. But its clear that this explanation 
is flawed when we recall that it is equally hard to make the argument 
that we are neglecting treatments and diagnosis of other fatal diseases 
likely to claim more lives than Covid. It seems that for reasons we 
don’t full understand we remain uniquely hypnotised by this virus. 
Perhaps its partly the element of surprise. "Its just not something we 
ever imagined dying from".


At least some aspects of the problem will be related to how knowledge 
circulates and delivered which in this case appears to have resolved 
into that most reductive of metrics; the ritual of the nightly Covid 
death toll.


So must we conclude that only fear of imminent death provides the 
communicative apparatus able to create the appropriate level of urgency 
? What would that look like? Nightly briefings on the increasing number 
of wild fires, floods and famines delivered from behind lecterns by 
worried looking ministers flanked by climate scientists.? Merely 
describing the scenario renders it immediately laughable but as we seek 
to rise to Brian Holmes’ challenge of creating an ‘eco state’ what would 
the alternatives look like ?


Just a month ago the scientific consensus was there was no way back to 
the pre- Covid life.  The best we could hope for was a combination of 
increasingly effective treatments combined with partially effective 
vaccines (like annual flu jabs) all of which would mitigate but not 
eliminate the virus. The oft-repeated mantra was ‘there is no silver 
bullet’.  But for once it appears scientific consensus was wrong. The 
vaccines look like being closer to being a ‘silver bullet’ that we had a 
right to expect. The ubiquitous cliché “the new normal” has been 
excitedly replaced by simply “getting back to normal” albeit darkly 
laced with the likelihood of mass unemployment.


We already see the ‘snap back” has begun as cities in China are roaring 
back into frenetic production encouraged by the regime’s rampant state 
managed capitalism. The likelihood is that we will not be far behind. 
But we must not forget that what we have learned means the terms of 
reference for these arguments have changed and radical action harder to 
dismiss


Nothing should detract from an extraordinary scientific and humanitarian 
achievement. But amidst the triumphalism we should not forget the 
widespread though largely unarticulated expectation that the difficult 
task of learning to live to with the virus would have provided the much 
needed social and psychological apparatus to help us make the sacrifices 
and the investment needed to begin mend the task of mending the damage 
crisis.


David Garcia
#  

Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[charlie derr]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA256

Fascinating discussion all (though i admit that i've not read every
post in this thread to the end (yet -- i do hope to get back and do
so, though frankly the truths being revealed make me think my mental
health may be more fragile than i previously thought (if i have
another psychotic break, and it's due to correctly apprehending the
problems of our planet rather than my own instability, will that make
it a "proper" response?)))

love the idea of "cosmology and messianic vision" Brian (though my
shrink probably would not be in favor of me fully embracing (at least
the latter))

On 11/26/20 1:13 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:
> It's got everything to do with Gaia theory and the circular
> causality of cybernetics (especially the Bateson variety)

For the last month, i've been tuning in to (and more recently actually
participating with) High Pitch: Conversations in a New Key w/ Bonnitta
Roy, Nora Bateson, Ria Baeck, Miriam Mason Martineau, Schuyler Brown,
and Ece Utkucan Anderson.

Nora is Gregory's daughter, and a visionary in her own right (imnho)
and all 5 of the other women are thinkers who i believe overlap with
an awful lot of the discussion i see here on nettime. This is also i
think crucially important. We men have made a real mess of things with
all of our patriarchal bullshit. i believe it's time to listen more
closely to us non-cis-het-males. This group of women is in my eyes a
great start. Let's support their systems-thinking leadership.

Today is the final event in this series. If you see this in time (it's
taking place less than 3 hours from now) and your schedule allows (and
there's a moderator available to push my message through to you all),
participation by a bunch of you would be wonderful:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0lc-2vqjsjGtaVWUf0jH96ZHWm2IUdN2vR

Otherwise, all of the previous High Pitch conversations are up on
youtube (Peter Limberg's "The Stoa" is the platform). i encourage you
to check some of them out.

Again, thanks to all of you for this particular discussion and also
for many years of insight. i'm back to lurking now...

with love and hope,
 ~c




- -- 
Charlie Derr   Director, Instructional Technology 413-528-7344
https://www.simons-rock.edu Bard College at Simon's Rock
Encryption key: http://hope.simons-rock.edu/~cderr/
Personal writing: https://medium.com/@cderr   Pronouns: he or they
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Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

Andreas asked (and Eric, Oliver and Brian offer plans for) how 'politics' (my 
word, not his) can work, practically. Offline I admitted that our ill-timed 
move to Australia means I'm as bad a person to reply as anyone could be but...

On the question of who can speak: when a hundred whales strand themselves. - 
commit group suicide - there are two or three possible causes: deep ocean sonar 
activity, typically military but sometimes natural deep ocean earthquakes (but 
none recently near the Chathams) or chasing food, typically travelling on 
currents of, in this case, cold water, set up by new seasonal conditions due to 
glacial melt. If a hundred migrants threw themselves onto a beach to die we 
should respond, whether we speak their language or not. Whale beachings speak. 
to us - it's just that we aren't listening. (Wittgenstein was wrong to say 'If 
a lion could speak, we would not understand him: lions do speak - we choose to 
ignore them)

On technology: step1: Grundrisse, the 'Fragment on machines': machinery is the 
congealed form of skills extracted from workers and turned into factories, ie 
'dead labour', now owned by the factory boss and turned into an instrument of 
discipline over the workers.  Step 2: any attempt to get round that discipline 
and reduce the burden of labour  becomes the property of the bosses too, is 
added to the machinery and its organisation; step 3: as Andreas has also 
pointed out, include here natural languages, maths etcetera - all culture is 
the congealed form of the knowledge and skills, as is institutional 
organisation; step 4: when I talked about this 15 years  ago with the Maori 
filmmaker Barry Barclay he replied, that's the problem with you pakeha: you 
don't know the names of your ancestors.

Technologies of every kind are the black boxes where we keep our ancestors 
locked up

Learning  from indigenous (and ancient folklore across Eurasia about djinns, 
fairies, dragons, dryads...)): what we call 'nature'  - mountains, rivers, 
trees as Brian just reminded us - are packed with life, and tho I prefer the 
word 'mediating' they communicate  - and as natural creatures who eat, breath 
and shit like anything else, we're part of that mediating/communicating ecology 
-- what we call nature is the domain of gods

to add another layer to Brian's delirium: a politics of gods and ancestors

Corporate capital (and its antecedent montheisms) has diminished, repressed and 
locked up our gods and ancestors for too long, "I love my fellow man" wrote 
Tolstoy " i would do anything to help him, anything at all -- except get off 
his back"

First step of a new politics: stop riding on the backs of gods and ancestors. 
History demonstrates that the longer we treat them as dumb animals that deserve 
to be ridden, the worse this gets


Sean

PS [ a small issue but -- monarch comes from mono-archos: rule by one.; 
an-archos is no rule (like the difference between aesthetic and anaesthetic) - 
no-rule tends to privilege the wealth/powerful: there's probably a Greek word 
for that too, but tyranny of the rich is a reasonable one - that's why they 
mock 1968 on one side of their faces and repeat it - this time as tragedy - 
with the other]


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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Thoughts on coups (John Young)
   2. Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups (Brian Holmes)


--

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:32:59 -0500
From: John Young 
To: 
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"

An-archism vs. mon-archism, many vs. few,
--

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:13:28 -0600
From: Brian Holmes 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt 
wrote:

The unthinkable has to be thought.
>

That's exactly it. I like this discussion. It's fascinating how the ideas
spring up like mushrooms. I especially like Oliver's call for all the
approaches that people might be experimenting with - aesthetic,
philosophical, activist, com

Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Brian Holmes]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt 
wrote:

The unthinkable has to be thought.
>

That's exactly it. I like this discussion. It's fascinating how the ideas
spring up like mushrooms. I especially like Oliver's call for all the
approaches that people might be experimenting with - aesthetic,
philosophical, activist, computational, whatever angle is calling you.
Things are falling apart. It's a time when you can have new ideas - you can
become something different. An animal, maybe.

Eric, I'm with you, it's possible to work on two levels at once, radical
transformation AND a more beneficial social order. This means facing up to
some extreme contradictions. In the US, we just looked straight down the
barrel of a coup. There's no way to love it. There's a sense across the
left that some kind of workable order has to be restored - people are going
hungry in the richest country on earth - but at the same time, the incoming
Biden government has "restoration" written all over it. Maybe not in the
worst way, but the best way is still terrible, whether it's patching up the
international alliance system or the domestic airline/oil/agribusiness
complex, real-estate speculation, education fraud, etc etc etc. We're faced
with a huge hangover of the same old garbage, but we can no longer preach
revolution and chaos because it plays into the hands of a literally
murderous right. So what to do? How do counter-systemic movements take on
the role of loyal opposition? It's a total contradiction. It's unthinkable.
It has to be done.

Let me take that just a little further.

At the deepest level, and in the direction that Oliver's going, what I see
emerging in the Americas is a terrestrial cosmology. This is the opposite
of a Cartesian mathematical universe oriented toward spatial infinity. It's
got everything to do with Gaia theory and the circular causality of
cybernetics (especially the Bateson variety) but don't fool yourself with
such concepts, because people don't experience it that way. They experience
it as listening to the voices and following the actions of indigenous
people. They/we experience it as an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and
a need for mutual aid, more true to the present than any theory could be.
Like any religious or messianic dimension, this terrestrial cosmology has
nothing to do with the state. It's about water. It's about heartbeat. It's
about murder. It's about responding to the threat of violence through the
exposure of your own fragile flesh. People can see society going down - and
they can feel the Holocene ending, whether they use fancy words or not. The
principles of the commons are based on those feelings. So is the solidarity
of the excluded. These telluric movements are going to grow, that's a good
thing. But green nationalism and ecofascism, those things will grow too.
Can you be messianic and practical all at once? I think you have to be. The
time demands it.

Andreas wants to know, are the trees and the whales really going to speak
in their own voice? Do trees have standing in the courts? The short answer
is obviously no. People speak for them, that's what every case of the
rights of nature and river personhood has already recorded (you know there
have been a number of those, right Andreas?). But the long answer is
different. Protesters start to surround the courthouses, like stands of
trees, and with stands of trees, if there are any. A new sense of what's
right and wrong, what's bearable and unbearable, puts down roots and shoots
up shoots, and people get shot by the cops and others go off listening to
the voices of the whales and society changes, right down to the laws and
the computer codes and even the sense of property ownership, which is the
bedrock of capitalism. Root breaks stone. The commons is a crack in
possessive individualism. A hugely popular novel, The Overstory, is about
exactly that. Messianic ideas emerge out of disaster. Well, we're in a
disaster now. It means the stars fall to earth, it's raining asteroids.
That's how stuff changes.

It's gonna go fast y'all, so get ready. I use geoengineering as a proxy for
everything coming down the pipe that's currently unthinkable. It's
scandalous because it's all too real, and all too close, tomorrow. A 2C
temperature rise is incredibly destructive, and geoengineering is
relatively cheap:  you can be sure some state or even non-state actor will
try it. Wake up my friends, that 2C world is already baked in, so think it
for a change! An eco-state is an opportunity to do the unthinkable, before
somebody else does it to you. And it's also a time to stop the worst, to
stop the nightmare stuff that's totally predictable already. Sean has given
a good rundown of a lot of it, already happening for the most part. Exactly
because of cosmology and messianic vision, I stand against the idea of
giving up government, instrumental rationality and distributive justice.
Nihilism is bullshit. People want a world for those they love. 

Re: Thoughts on coups

[John Young]

An-archism vs. mon-archism, many vs. few, devil 
vs. deity, wilderness vs borderlands, mob vs. 
cops, they vs. we, other vs. I, id vs. ego.


Same old duplicitous dichotomy, constitutional 
democracy as if much different from constitutional monarchy.


"Constitutional" the playbook to invest scribes, 
judges and military as the biblical interpreters 
and enforcers of faith-based nationalism.


At 06:29 PM 11/24/2020, they wrote to them:
On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM Sean Cubitt 
<<mailto:sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au>sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au> wrote:


Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of 
our times, migration. Post-nationalism means 
opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy 
learn that removing the causes of migration - 
war, pandemic, climate change, colonialism - is 
the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the billionaire class)



This is for certain, because the only 
alternative to opening borders - and at the same 
time, engaging in co-development strategies that 
allow some people, at least, to remain where 
they are - is war plain and simple. Climate 
change is going to translate into burnt crops, 
forced migration and war long before rising seas 
drive people out of lower Manhattan. And state 
collapse induced by neoliberalism will do the 
same. The current political economy is a vicious 
circle getting worse, 2020 has sure made that clear!

Â
Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an 
alliance of the excluded - human, ecological and 
- I would add, though it needs a longer argument - technological



The question I have, is how to build an 
effective alliance of the excluded, one that 
does not become a wrecking ball in its own right?


A lot of anarchism is now doing the work of 
neoliberalism, it's heavily nihilistic. 
Autonomism itself was an uneasy fusion, 
anarcho-communism, but the communist part was 
gradually reduced to a kind of fantasy for 
intellectuals whose real politics were anarchist 
by default - not their own default, but because 
every attempt to construct a 
state-for-the-multitudes was foreclosed. In the 
absence of a constructive principle you get 
alienated people looking to accelerate the 
breakdown, on both right and left btw. The US is 
rampant with that kind of accelerationist now - 
in fact, on the extreme right they describe themselves with that exact word.


I think we need an eco-state. I mean a form of 
social coordination that doesn't precipitate 
collapse, but protects against, reverses the 
trends, allows human and ecological healing. Of 
course you can imagine an eco-state in an 
authoritarian vein, because that's where China 
is going. Rana Dasgupta surely sees it 
differently - I'm looking forward to read that 
text - but I see China going toward a state that 
will internalize earth system imperatives, and 
actually respond to the climate crisis by 
producing self-driving electric cars, total 
surveillance and geoengineering. Geoengineering 
is good - or at least, it's inevitable - but 
authoritarianism isn't. How should the Western 
countries and their "integrated peripheries" 
respond? What can civil-society movements do 
about it? The answer is, we don't have a clue. 
Shame on us. Mexico is collapsing, and white 
people in the US think they can bring back the good old days.


As for the carbon tax that someone mentioned, I 
hear you, but it's too little too late. It might 
have helped twenty years ago, if it hadn't been 
just another neoliberal ploy for gaming the 
system. It can still do some good, in a more 
serious form, but now we're on a timeline that's 
going to require central coordination in 
addition to market coordination. Unless we just 
want civilizational breakdown in the megafires 
of the Pyrocene. Which is really coming into its 
own in Colorado, by the way. I'm afraid it will 
put a real dent in the tourist industry.


Green New Deal or bust. I'm not kidding when I 
talk about eco-socialism. The question is how to get there.


Brian



 sean

Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA

<mailto:scub...@unimelb.edu.au>scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#>https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#


--


Message: 1
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:58:52 +0100
From: Felix Stalder <<mailto:fe...@openflows.com>fe...@openflows.com>
To: <mailto:nettime-l@mail.kein.org>nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: 
<<mailto:2a74602d-d71a-2175-62ad-29b62760e...@openflows.com>2a74602d-d71a-2175-62ad-29b62760e...@openflows.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"



On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two ce

Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[oliver lerone schultz]

lates to the way in which 
humans treat other humans (thus an intra-anthropological issue), but 
because these once excluded individuals and groups can speak for 
themselves in a human language.


I agree that all humans must factor the oceans, mountains, trees, 
etc., into the way they live on the Earth (some do), and I also agree 
that capitalism systematically treats these as cheap or free 
resources. (But maybe it is not only capitalism, but homo sapiens in 
general? What has brought about and sustained the 
non-nature-exploitative civilisations?)


But I wonder what the "voice" of the oceans, mountains, trees is going 
to be. Will that "voice" be the storms, the droughts, the fires? Or 
will it be the voice of human scientists (some of whom search for the 
sentience of trees and stones, while others support geo-engineering, 
and yet others look for the next site for open pit mining)?


And then there is the question of how the "technological" is brought 
into the alliance of the excluded...


Regards,
-a
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Sean Cubitt <mailto:sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au>
25. November 2020 um 01:19
War: is already the de facto result of climate change in what used to 
be the Fertile Crescent. Trump damn near made it an issue of war on 
the Mexican border. If Australia wasn't a federation, its states would 
be at war over the selling off of the Murray Darling river system's 
water. And the pyrocene is entrenched in Australia.


There used to be a sour joke: There are Irish nationalists, Welsh 
Nationalists, Scottish nationalists and... English Greens. Like 
anarcho-fascists (Dominic Cummings, late of Downing Street, was just 
such a right-wing situationist), green-nationalists are equally 
revanchist.


Crutzen and Stoermer closed their 2000 proposal for the term 
'Anthropocene' thus:
'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the 
global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards 
global, sustainable, environmental management'


Geoengineering by a class of scientists (shades of HG Wells' Shape of 
Things to Come') may be as risky as scientists running nuclear 
programs. Tho maybe Wells also had something smart behind his 
aeronautical Übermenschen - world government. There's a good history 
of the UN that uses the Victorian poet Tenison's lofty vision of The 
Parliament of Man for its title - the gender is clearly out; but so is 
the speciesism. Rancière argues that politics occurs when the excluded 
demand a part in their governance - a demand that changes government 
permanently (as women and ex-slaves have done already). It is 
unthinkable that oceans and mountains should have a seat in 
government, just as it was unthinkable for women - and still is 
unthinkable for migrants - to have a say in how they are governed. The 
unthinkable has to be thought.


Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and 
re-practiced - no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better 
phrase, common land, general intellect (including those forms it takes 
when congealed into machines and infrastructures). We could start with 
that absurd contradiction 'intellectual property' - commons as 
peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start from undoing at least property 
as core concept of western Enlightenment. That this implies undoing 
the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one way to recognise 
where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn't


Think local, act global

s

Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA

scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#



*From:* Brian Holmes 
*Sent:* Wednesday, 25 November 2020 10:29 AM
*To:* Sean Cubitt 
*Cc:* nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
*Subject:* [EXT] Re:  Thoughts on coups
*
*UoM notice: *External email. Be cautious of links, attachments, or 
impersonation attempts


*

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM Sean Cubitt 
mailto:sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:



Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times,
migration. Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way
will the wealthy learn that removing the causes of migration -
war, pandemic, climate change, colonialism - is the only way to
survive (unless of course you're on

Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Sean, Brian, others, thank you for the interesting and engaging 
contributions. (Some of it gets a bit cryptic since it refers to 
political discourses that are not immediately apparent, at least to this 
reader, but that's generally OK for a most-of-the-time lurker.)


Sean Cubitt wrote (Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM):
> Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the
> excluded - human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a
> longer argument - technological.

(25.11.20 um 01:19):
Rancière argues that politics occurs when the excluded demand a part in 
their governance - a demand that changes government permanently (as 
women and ex-slaves have done already). It is unthinkable that oceans 
and mountains should have a seat in government, just as it was 
unthinkable for women - and still is unthinkable for migrants - to have 
a say in how they are governed. The unthinkable has to be thought.


I wonder whether you could expand on this a bit; I understand the 
argument (I don't know whether you would call it posthumanist, for lack 
of a better word I would), but i cannot get my head around the idea how 
the anthropo-logical systems of political representation, of governance, 
could be transformed into systems that would encompass nonhuman beings, 
incl. technological, as equals.


You are imputing that all of the following: women, ex-slaves, migrants, 
oceans, mountains, [technics], are all "excluded" in a way that can be 
overcome. I would maintain that what may have been unthinkable for some 
people in some places in some past (that women, ex-slaves, migrants 
would have a say in how they are governed), is of a different order, not 
only because it relates to the way in which humans treat other humans 
(thus an intra-anthropological issue), but because these once excluded 
individuals and groups can speak for themselves in a human language.


I agree that all humans must factor the oceans, mountains, trees, etc., 
into the way they live on the Earth (some do), and I also agree that 
capitalism systematically treats these as cheap or free resources. (But 
maybe it is not only capitalism, but homo sapiens in general? What has 
brought about and sustained the non-nature-exploitative civilisations?)


But I wonder what the "voice" of the oceans, mountains, trees is going 
to be. Will that "voice" be the storms, the droughts, the fires? Or will 
it be the voice of human scientists (some of whom search for the 
sentience of trees and stones, while others support geo-engineering, and 
yet others look for the next site for open pit mining)?


And then there is the question of how the "technological" is brought 
into the alliance of the excluded...


Regards,
-a
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Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Hi Brian, Sean,

> On 25 Nov 2020, at 01:19, Sean Cubitt  wrote:
> 
> Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and re-practiced 
> - no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better phrase, common 
> land, general intellect (including those forms it takes when congealed into 
> machines and infrastructures). We could start with that absurd contradiction 
> 'intellectual property' - commons as peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start 
> from undoing at least property as core concept of western Enlightenment. That 
> this implies undoing the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one 
> way to recognise where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn’t

I agree with Sean that the discourse and practices of the commons is one of the 
few truly hopeful political tendencies of recent times. My guide into the 
domain of the commons has for a long time been David Bollier and his excellent 
work on the subject (http://www.bollier.org/ ).

However, I also agree with Brian that we (desperately) need a state, or some 
more stable form of collective governance in this equation. One of the most 
interesting things about the commons is that it operates beyond both state and 
market, but it operates not so much in contradiction to these two as that it 
operates complementary or in parallel to them.

From the extended debates on the commons it has become gradually clear that 
while community-governed solutions can work well locally and translocally (more 
or less in the vein of Elinor Ostrom's work on governance of the commons) the 
most beneficial situation is where an accountable state can guarantee and 
facilitate the commons to thrive.

In good old Europe meanwhile the green deal is at the heart of political 
debates here, and bitterly opposed by predictable political agents (i.e. 
Brexiteers in the UK, nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland, and so 
called ‘populists’ across the board). In The Netherlands the worst political 
agent in this regard cynically named the Forum for Democracy (Forum for 
Demagogy would be a much better name for them) just went into complete meltdown 
over a scandal involving their youth organisation spreading antisemitic and 
nazi-adoration materials. Mind you they won the most recent provincial election 
and are holding now most seats in the senate (First Chamber), but nowhere near 
a majority – the Dutch political landscape is thankfully totally fragmented. It 
is of crucial importance to use this momentum here to avoid another right wing 
outgrowth to take over again. They are complete climate change denialists, etc. 
needless to say.

Replacing the social with the collective of humans and non-humans is another 
good starting point for a new kind of political discourse and new political 
practices. I think this is already beyond the unthinkable. Some local examples 
come to mind, such as the most obvious one the Animal Party which has a steady 
representation in Dutch Parliament now for about 10 years. There are also 
interesting trajectories launched from the cultural sphere, such as the Embassy 
of the North Sea, which treats the sea and all its stakeholders / constituents 
(human / non-human / biological / material) as political actors with interests 
and rights - see: https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/ 


Also the extensive Neuhaus project organised last year by Het Nieuwe Instituut 
in Rotterdam is a relevant example to start thinking these new relations and 
how they can be implemented in the political body - 
https://neuhaus.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en 
 

Also in 2019 I developed a course called The Four Ecologies, drawing on 
Guattari’s still highly relevant Three Ecologies text (referencing the material 
/ social / subjective ecological registers) and extending this with a fourth 
register, that of non-human experience (building on Latour, Morton, Haraway 
etc.).

There’s more examples, in many places - Open Humanities Press has been 
publishing a lot of relevant material in this direction as well, etc etc..

So, all this is certainly not unthinkable. The point is to start applying these 
insights. For that we need strong collective actors (the green state and 
manifold communities sustaining and growing the commons). 

So we need commons AND states.

grtngs,
Eric

p.s.  - and yes, ‘intellectual property = cultural theft’

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Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

War: is already the de facto result of climate change in what used to be the 
Fertile Crescent. Trump damn near made it an issue of war on the Mexican 
border. If Australia wasn't a federation, its states would be at war over the 
selling off of the Murray Darling river system's water. And the pyrocene is 
entrenched in Australia.

There used to be a sour joke: There are Irish nationalists, Welsh Nationalists, 
Scottish nationalists and... English Greens. Like anarcho-fascists (Dominic 
Cummings, late of Downing Street, was just such a right-wing situationist), 
green-nationalists are equally revanchist.

Crutzen and Stoermer closed their 2000 proposal for the term 'Anthropocene' 
thus:
'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global 
research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, 
sustainable, environmental management'

Geoengineering by a class of scientists (shades of HG Wells' Shape of Things to 
Come') may be as risky as scientists running nuclear programs. Tho maybe Wells 
also had something smart behind his aeronautical Übermenschen - world 
government. There's a good history of the UN that uses the Victorian poet 
Tenison's lofty vision of The Parliament of Man for its title - the gender is 
clearly out; but so is the speciesism. Rancière argues that politics occurs 
when the excluded demand a part in their governance - a demand that changes 
government permanently (as women and ex-slaves have done already). It is 
unthinkable that oceans and mountains should have a seat in government, just as 
it was unthinkable for women - and still is unthinkable for migrants - to have 
a say in how they are governed. The unthinkable has to be thought.

Eco-socialism yes - but only if the 'social' is rethought - and re-practiced - 
no longer exclusively as human: The Commons is a better phrase, common land, 
general intellect (including those forms it takes when congealed into machines 
and infrastructures). We could start with that absurd contradiction 
'intellectual property' - commons as peer-to-peer ecology/economy may start 
from undoing at least property as core concept of western Enlightenment. That 
this implies undoing the 'proper' as the principle of individualism is one way 
to recognise where anarchism belongs to capital and when it doesn't

Think local, act global

s


Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#


From: Brian Holmes 
Sent: Wednesday, 25 November 2020 10:29 AM
To: Sean Cubitt 
Cc: nettime-l@mail.kein.org 
Subject: [EXT] Re:  Thoughts on coups

UoM notice: External email. Be cautious of links, attachments, or impersonation 
attempts


On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM Sean Cubitt 
mailto:sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au>> wrote:

Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration. 
Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy learn 
that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate change, 
colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the 
billionaire class)

This is for certain, because the only alternative to opening borders - and at 
the same time, engaging in co-development strategies that allow some people, at 
least, to remain where they are - is war plain and simple. Climate change is 
going to translate into burnt crops, forced migration and war long before 
rising seas drive people out of lower Manhattan. And state collapse induced by 
neoliberalism will do the same. The current political economy is a vicious 
circle getting worse, 2020 has sure made that clear!

Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded - 
human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument - 
technological

The question I have, is how to build an effective alliance of the excluded, one 
that does not become a wrecking ball in its own right?

A lot of anarchism is now doing the work of neoliberalism, it's heavily 
nihilistic. Autonomism itself was an uneasy fusion, anarcho-communism, but the 
communist part was gradually reduced to a kind of fantasy for intellectuals 
whose real politics were anarchist by default - not their own default, but 
because every attempt to construct a state-for-the-multitudes was foreclosed. 
In the absence of a constructive principle you get alienated people looking to 
accelerate the breakdown, on both right and left btw. The US is rampant with 
that kind of accelerationist now - in fact, on the extreme right they describe 
themselves with that exact word.

I think we need an eco-state. I mean a form of social coordination that doesn't 
precipitate collapse, but pr

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Brian Holmes]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 3:53 PM Sean Cubitt 
wrote:

>
> Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration.
> Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy
> learn that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate
> change, colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're
> one of the billionaire class)
>

This is for certain, because the only alternative to opening borders - and
at the same time, engaging in co-development strategies that allow some
people, at least, to remain where they are - is war plain and simple.
Climate change is going to translate into burnt crops, forced migration and
war long before rising seas drive people out of lower Manhattan. And state
collapse induced by neoliberalism will do the same. The current political
economy is a vicious circle getting worse, 2020 has sure made that clear!


> Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded
> - human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument -
> technological
>

The question I have, is how to build an effective alliance of the excluded,
one that does not become a wrecking ball in its own right?

A lot of anarchism is now doing the work of neoliberalism, it's heavily
nihilistic. Autonomism itself was an uneasy fusion, anarcho-communism, but
the communist part was gradually reduced to a kind of fantasy for
intellectuals whose real politics were anarchist by default - not their own
default, but because every attempt to construct a state-for-the-multitudes
was foreclosed. In the absence of a constructive principle you get
alienated people looking to accelerate the breakdown, on both right and
left btw. The US is rampant with that kind of accelerationist now - in
fact, on the extreme right they describe themselves with that exact word.

I think we need an eco-state. I mean a form of social coordination that
doesn't precipitate collapse, but protects against, reverses the trends,
allows human and ecological healing. Of course you can imagine an eco-state
in an authoritarian vein, because that's where China is going. Rana
Dasgupta surely sees it differently - I'm looking forward to read that text
- but I see China going toward a state that will internalize earth system
imperatives, and actually respond to the climate crisis by producing
self-driving electric cars, total surveillance and geoengineering.
Geoengineering is good - or at least, it's inevitable - but
authoritarianism isn't. How should the Western countries and their
"integrated peripheries" respond? What can civil-society movements do about
it? The answer is, we don't have a clue. Shame on us. Mexico is collapsing,
and white people in the US think they can bring back the good old days.

As for the carbon tax that someone mentioned, I hear you, but it's too
little too late. It might have helped twenty years ago, if it hadn't been
just another neoliberal ploy for gaming the system. It can still do some
good, in a more serious form, but now we're on a timeline that's going to
require central coordination in addition to market coordination. Unless we
just want civilizational breakdown in the megafires of the Pyrocene. Which
is really coming into its own in Colorado, by the way. I'm afraid it will
put a real dent in the tourist industry.

Green New Deal or bust. I'm not kidding when I talk about eco-socialism.
The question is how to get there.

Brian



>  sean
>
> Sean Cubitt | He/Him
> Professor of Screen Studies
> School of Culture and Communication
> W104 John Medley Building
> University of Melbourne
> Grattan Street
> Victoria 3010
> AUSTRALIA
>
> scub...@unimelb.edu.au
>
>
> New Book: Anecdotal Evidence
>
>
> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#
>
> --
>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:58:52 +0100
> From: Felix Stalder 
> To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
> Message-ID: <2a74602d-d71a-2175-62ad-29b62760e...@openflows.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>
>
> On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> > Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> > down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> > money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push
> it
> > over the top into ecosocialism.
>
> There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
> be interesting to work out their relation.
>
> The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
> one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
> renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
> damage already 

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt]

Brian hits the nail on the head when he writes "paying out fiat money to smooth 
the
jagged edges of the business cycle and thereby making proletarian
consumption into the very engine of capitalist growth."

As Felix adds, capital absolutely requires externalised nature - a cost-free 
resource which can be mined and dumped into at no cost.

The model also applies now to the proletarian consumer: once merely formally 
subsumed under capital, the new form of consumption has been 'really' subsumed: 
the form of consumption is fully integrated - all consumption is also 
productive, generating data for further exploitation. The mass production of 
debt is a crucial part of the process: as is the mental health epidemic that it 
generates - this is one way capital dumps its unwanted product, just as it 
dumps unwanted heat into the atmosphere.

Waste is not marginal: it is integral to capital - and that includes wasting 
excess humans, ie those that are not in the inner circle of obscene wealth. The 
destruction of the state by capital under Brexit / Trumpism is one strategy for 
ensuring a) the proletarianization of the real subsumption of consumption under 
capital and b) the externalisation/environmentalisation of the bio-mass and - 
in a way that must terrify all post-autonomists - the general intellect.

Ex-communist polities (populist cronyism in its Putin/Xi variants) still seem 
to prefer state capture; neo-con/neo-libs go for state destruction: but the 
distinction is blurry (Georges Monbiot has a suggestion why:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism

More depressing is the failure of the Left - while half believed the EU was a 
flawed but viable system for controlling the worst excesses of capital (which 
is why Murdoch and other gang members wanted it wrecked), the other half, 
including Corbyn, saw it as a capitalist conspiracy. Given that nationalism is 
such a hallmark of the rhetoric of neo-populists, one obvious experiment to 
make is a post-nationalist left - which instantly implies not rebuilding 
globalisation as it existed prior to the GFC but one that builds on what now 
constitutes the material infrastructure: populations, networks and ecologies.

Nationalism builds on the other great crisis of our times, migration. 
Post-nationalism means opening borders. Only that way will the wealthy learn 
that removing the causes of migration - war, pandemic, climate change, 
colonialism - is the only way to survive (unless of course you're one of the 
billionaire class)

Any 21st century politics has to be formed by an alliance of the excluded - 
human, ecological and - I would add, though it needs a longer argument - 
technological


 sean


Sean Cubitt | He/Him
Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA


scub...@unimelb.edu.au


New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en=au#




Message: 1
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:58:52 +0100
From: Felix Stalder 
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  Thoughts on coups
Message-ID: <2a74602d-d71a-2175-62ad-29b62760e...@openflows.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"



On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
> over the top into ecosocialism.

There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
be interesting to work out their relation.

The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
damage already done (I know, this term is conventionally used in a
different sense). A little bit of this we are already seeing, with the
EU's project to become a first climate neutral continent by 2050, China
commitment by 2060 and new Biden admin making similar gestures. So far,
actual effects, in terms of reducing the output of CO2 and and
ending/slowing down the loss of biological diversity, have not been
achieved. The big question is: is that too little too late, unable to
overcome very real system barriers to substantial change? Or can this be
made into the beginning of a self-accelerating shift in the energy
regime of global civilization?

In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
the old Marxian idea that capitalism will produce p

Re: Thoughts on coups

[Felix Stalder]

On 24.11.20 04:14, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
> down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
> money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
> over the top into ecosocialism.

There are probably two distinct political strategies here. And it would
be interesting to work out their relation.

The first is move capitalism towards a different regime of accumulation,
one based less on extractivism and consumerism but rather more on
renewable energy and "eco-system services" for repairing some of the
damage already done (I know, this term is conventionally used in a
different sense). A little bit of this we are already seeing, with the
EU's project to become a first climate neutral continent by 2050, China
commitment by 2060 and new Biden admin making similar gestures. So far,
actual effects, in terms of reducing the output of CO2 and and
ending/slowing down the loss of biological diversity, have not been
achieved. The big question is: is that too little too late, unable to
overcome very real system barriers to substantial change? Or can this be
made into the beginning of a self-accelerating shift in the energy
regime of global civilization?

In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
the old Marxian idea that capitalism will produce productive forces on
which communism can be realized.


all the best. Felix


-- 
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| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |


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Re: Thoughts on coups

[Brian Holmes]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 8:23 PM Max Herman  wrote:

>
>
> What if socialism has also won the Cold War, i.e. a system has prevailed
> in which periodic bubbles are cushioned by ever-replenishing state
> bailouts?
>

Toni Negri had this idea quite a while ago, in a text that more or less
launched the movement of autonomous Marxism:
https://libcom.org/files/negri_keynes.pdf

Negri thought that the Keynesian welfare state was a successful response,
by the bourgeoisie, to the challenge of the Bolshevik revolution. The
response came at the moment of capital's greatest weakness: 1929 and the
following decade, during which Keynes and Roosevelt invented the basic
principles of welfare. The people would be saved from the collapse of
entrepreneurial capitalism, but their revolutionary agency would be
sacrificed to a new and higher form of the same old system. The state
internalized the workers' demands, paying out fiat money to smooth the
jagged edges of the business cycle and thereby making proletarian
consumption into the very engine of capitalist growth. For this reason,
Negri believed, the state could no longer be taken over by a revolutionary
class. Instead, it had to be subverted, destroyed from within. A whole lot
of 1968 sprang from that logic. It cast a long shadow over the following
decades (and there are other versions of this analysis in the Frankfurt
School, Debord, and the American theorists of monopoly capitalism during
the postwar era).

Unfortunately, we've done a lousy job of subverting the state. The Occupy
movement (bless David Graeber's departed shade) made that painfully
obvious. We would need a theorist of Negri's stature to chart a new course
for the twenty-first century.

Here's my two cents: Keynes aimed to save capitalism from itself. Double
down on Keynes, unleash vast new creative energies on the basis of fiat
money, and maybe, instead of sapping capital's foundations, we can push it
over the top into ecosocialism.

principle of hope, Brian
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Thoughts on coups

[Max Herman]

Hi all,

Can we say that coups have now become quantum, both happening and not happening 
at the same time in a cloud of probability?

Classical Marxism, if I am correct, predicted that capitalism would inevitably 
collapse and disappear to be replaced by a system in which the workers control 
the means of production.  Later, Leninism declared that revolutionary 
intelligentsia must assist (partly for ethical reasons) in hastening the 
collapse by direct action, and later Stalinism declared that totalitarian 
enforcement of capitalist collapse (by totalistic nationalism) was also 
necessary and hence ethically permissible.  (I've read that Lenin incidentally 
did not agree with Stalinism, at the end, but called it "nationalist socialism" 
barely if at all distinguishable from the revolution in 1930's Germany.)

What if socialism has also won the Cold War, i.e. a system has prevailed in 
which periodic bubbles are cushioned by ever-replenishing state bailouts?  The 
collapse is merely quantized now, in something like an eternal return.  And 
just as necessarily, every marginal coup is repulsed by a rebirth of democracy 
every so often and of limited scope a la Montaigne's perpetual see-saw.

Apologies if someone has already articulated this and done so much better, and 
for any ethical flaws of which I'm oblivious this sunny afternoon.

Very best regards,

Max

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