Re: Can the Left Meme?
I'm curious: what is the fundamental difference between conditioning
a person's behavior through feeding information ("speech"), and
conditioning a person's behavior with a baseball bat?
The traditional view is that a person can rationally process the
information and make choices, as opposed to being subjected to bodily
harm. This is completely false, as the money spent in advertizing,
propaganda and info giants proves. With the modern technology, speech
is a cheaper and more reliable way to unconditionally condition
people. However, this does require technology, usually outside
individual's reach. For most people, violence is more effective way
for their influence on the world than speech. People are generally
rational creatures.
The 'left' was first to understand this, so it is only natural that it
will internally sanction speech as violence, as it already has control
over info pipes and doesn't need competition. Externally, the left
will promote the individual speech, as it is perfectly aware that such
speech is irrelevant against mechanized info pipes. The situation is
perfectly symmetric on the right - the right will promote individual
violence potential, as it is perfectly aware that it stands no chance
against the organized enforcement.
For the traditional right, the government is the force monopoly, for
the left the government is the speech monopoly.
On 6/15/17, 14:16, t byfield wrote:
different view of the relationship between speech and violence. The
mainstream
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Re: Can the Left Meme?
Am 15.06.2017 um 12:05 schrieb "Prof. Dr. Tilman Baumgärtel"@mx.kein.org:
> I would argue that this type of activity has been highjacked by the
> alt-right in a similar fashion as concepts of "Gegenöffentlichkeit",
> alternative media etc. I don´t think that there is anything intrinsic
> right-wing about memes. It is just that the alt-right-trolls - because
> of their nihilism/cynicism - can create memes that are atrocious
> enough to stand out even within the current race to the bottom on the
> 4chan-segment of the internet and elsewhere.
As a thought experiment: The concept of a bipartisan political landscape
is, I would say a fairly recent Western conception to sort political
complexity and it served us well.
Yet, many political conflicts in our world do not fit into this
simplified bipartisan model.
Imagine we just assume for the sake of it that Trump was "left wing" and
then redefine progressiveness. How would we even falsify that the
"alt-right" is not left?
Our conception of the left is shaped by a series of established
positions, modes of operations, historical anchors, a certain humanism
etc. and an origin, an evolution of positions from a left wing branded
discourse.
>From a European perspective it is not too difficult to make up the
narrative that the Democrats are right wing and the republican party
does not even fit in our landscape as Timothy Ash once convincingly
pointed out when he described euroconservatism as old chaps who go hunting.
Am 15.06.2017 um 23:16 schrieb t byfield:
> But that content is
> arbitrary: there's nothing intrinsically sinister or violent about Pepe
> the Frog or any other right-wing -eme, visual or verbal. On the
> contrary, the right's approach is precisely to assign esoteric and even
> occult meanings to phrases, punctuation ("((()))"), images, rhetorical
> forms, gestures, anything. To the extent that "memeing" means anything,
> most of its meaning boils down to that process.
Still you need an observer or a third party value position. The whole
process cannot be imagined enemy-free. Traditional policy agendas could.
What is the "positive" agenda that emerges from this discourse? What do
they stand "for"? Difficult.
--- A
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Re: Can the Left Meme?
Tilman, I couldn't agree more - and would suggest to extend this history to the memes of the Luddites and even revolutionary pamphlets and caricatures in the reformation age. This was a highly successful political meme in its time, the early 16th century: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ego_sum_Papa.jpg ; just like contemporary Internet memes, it relied on mass reproduction technology and popularized access to media. Even the visual structure of imageboard memes is a 1:1 continuation of medieval and Renaissance emblems which consisted of a title (motto) printed on top, an image (pictura) in the middle and a subtitle (subscriptio) at the bottom. When emblems fell out of fashion in the 18th century, newspaper caricatures took over their structure. Internet images memes are just the last part of this media history. Even theories of memetic information and the grotesque as an weapon of information warfare is much older than the Internet (and Dawkins' genetics). William S. Burroughs' early 1970s essay "The Electronic Revolution" (electronically reprinted by UbuWeb here: http://www.ubu.com/historical/burroughs/electronic_revolution.pdf) is all about memetic warfare. Quote from page 24/25: > "So does scrambled word and image. The units are unscrambling compulsively, presenting certain words and images to the subject and this repetitive presentation is irritating certain bodily and neutral areas. The cells so irritated can produce over a period of time the biologic virus units. We now have a new virus that can be communicated and indeed the subject may be desperate to communicate this thing that is bursting inside him. He is heavy with the load. Could this load be good and beautiful? Is it possible to create a virus which will communicate calm and sweet reasonableness? A virus must parasitise a host in order to survive. It uses the cellular material of the host to make copies of itself. in most cases this is damaging to the host. The virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force. An unwanted guest who makes you sick to look at is never good or beautiful. It is moreover a guest who always repeats itself word for word take for take." In academic cultural theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the medieval carnival as a populist spectacle of inversion of ruling codes can be seamlessly applied to 4chan's and 8chan's meme culture. > Leftists are by defintion attached to some kind of humanist view of > the world and hence cannot stoop low enough to create stuff that is > attractive to the crowd the enjoys /pol/-type of Memes. It didn't always use to be like this. Think of the meme campaigns in punk culture - starting with "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols and the accompanying visual campaign designed by Jamie Reid, think of the anarchist British "Class War" zine and its headline "Another Fucking Royal Parasite" atop of a picture of Princess Diana and her newborn child, or think of the 1990s London-based "Underground" zine (made among others by Matthew Fuller and Graham Harwood) which featured a tabloid-size image of prime minister John Major with a penis as a his nose (http://www.paperposts.me/posts/underground-a-free-broadsheet-for-london). If such forms are no longer acceptable within the so-called left (a term which in the American context problematically conflates the two opposites of liberalism and socialism), 'Neoreactionaries' have some point when they call it a "cathedral". -F # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Can the Left Meme?
Lots of bad bits too. No amount of theory can paper over basic flaws in
analysis.
One of the more useful observations I've seen lately (can't remember the
source, alas) is that in the current US political context rightists see
violence as a form of speech whereas leftists see speech as a form of
violence. True or accurate or not, this observation has the virtue of
highlighting the relationship(s) between speech and violence.
When it comes to recently reinvigorated right-wing revanchists, their
acceptance and even embrace of violence transforms the meaning of their
words and images. Meaning follows a sadistic logic, in which words
explain action and action lends force to words. But that content is
arbitrary: there's nothing intrinsically sinister or violent about Pepe
the Frog or any other right-wing -eme, visual or verbal. On the
contrary, the right's approach is precisely to assign esoteric and even
occult meanings to phrases, punctuation ("((()))"), images, rhetorical
forms, gestures, anything. To the extent that "memeing" means anything,
most of its meaning boils down to that process.
Leftoids can "counter-mirror" (IOW, parrot or even ape) rightist
techniques as much as they want, but it won't work very well because the
left has a fundamentally different view of the relationship between
speech and violence. The mainstream left, and even most of the radical
left at this point, has completely forsworn violence as a legitimate
political strategy. That was partly deliberate, a victory of important
moral strains in leftist and progressive thought; it was also partly
unwitting and/or circumstantial, the result of ferocious persecution and
subversion by rightist and state elements. But, regardless the origin,
the insistence that speech and violence are categorically different
rather than a continuum has severely limited what the l3efts's words and
images can mean. Put simply, the left doesn't inspire fear.
This is just a historical observation. I am CERTAINLY NOT suggesting
that the left should rethink its rejection of violence. Precisely the
opposite: I think that good-faith, communitarian rightists (there are
many) need to find ways to restrain and/or exclude those who would
pursue similar political outcomes with force rather than persuasion.
But the question here shouldn't be "can the left meme," it should be
"can the left speak and act with violent abandon?" At the moment, the
answer is no. That's one reason — just one — that I'm a leftist.
Cheers,
T
On 11 Jun 2017, at 18:20, Gabriella "Biella" Coleman wrote:
https://www.textezurkunst.de/106/notes-toward-memes-production/
Lots of good bits in here covering the nitty gritty mechanics of the
alt-right and their stellar command of media manipulation in light of
theories of art and cultural production. Worth a read.
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Re: Paul Mason: Jeremy Corbyn has read Antonio Gramsci(Guardian)
Hiya, Contrary to Paul's claims, we are to the Left of Stalin's choice for leader of the Italian Communist Party. Labour is not aiming to replace the existing Few with a new Few, but to empower the Many to determine their own destiny. Richard === Dr. Richard Barbrook Dept of Politics and IR, University of Westminster 32-38 Wells Street LONDON W1T 3UW England +44 (0)7879 441873 Skype: richard.barbrook Facebook: Richard Barbrook Twitter: @richardbarbrook http://www.peoplesconsensus.org http://www.cybersalon.org http://www.classwargames.net http://www.politicsandmediafreedom.net http://www.imaginaryfutures.net http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/other-works 'Clause 5: That as the laws ought to be equal, so they must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people.' The Levellers, The 1647 Agreement of the People for a Firm and Present Peace Upon Grounds of Common Right. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Can the Left Meme?
Dear all, the Left has invented the Meme and created some of the most successful memes ever. You do not have to look at relatively obscure groups like the Situationists or the Angry Brigade. Just look at the work of German Dada artist John Heartfield whose Memes/collages combined with strong slogangs were published in socialist magazines with high circulation and read widely in the German workers movement of the 1920s. They have been reprinted and republished endlessly ever since. Some examples, some of which you might have seen: http://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/political-posters-sale I would argue that this type of activity has been highjacked by the alt-right in a similar fashion as concepts of "Gegenöffentlichkeit", alternative media etc. I don´t think that there is anything intrinsic right-wing about memes. It is just that the alt-right-trolls - because of their nihilism/cynicism - can create memes that are atrocious enough to stand out even within the current race to the bottom on the 4chan-segment of the internet and elsewhere. Leftists are by defintion attached to some kind of humanist view of the world and hence cannot stoop low enough to create stuff that is attractive to the crowd the enjoys /pol/-type of Memes. But I don´t think that it is a loss, since you will not convience this clientel of your political agenda, no matter how much you try to cater to their taste. Yours, Tilman Am 13.06.2017 um 10:21 schrieb Keith Hart: Just to return to basics for a moment, the neologism "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary or Darwinian biologist, in The Selfish Gene (1976) which came hard after E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) which was in turn heavily criticized methodologically within the profession by Richard Lewontin and Stephen J Gould and from outside by Marshall Sahlins The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976). This was the heyday of a convergence between market economics and evolutionary biology documented at length by Philip Mirowski in Machine Dreams: How Economics Became a Cyborg Science (2001). Mirowski earlier demonstrated how late 19th century economics superficially mimicked physics (specifically the second law of thermodynamics) in More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics (1989). <> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Paul Mason: Jeremy Corbyn has read Antonio Gramsci (Guardian)
Original to: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2017/jun/12/paul-mason-jeremy-corbyn-defeat-ruling-elite-antonio-gramsci Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite by Paul Mason, The Guardian, June 13, 2017. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci understood that before taking power, the left must disrupt and defy common sense – just as Labour defeated the proposition that ‘Corbyn can’t win’ To stop Jeremy Corbyn, the British elite is prepared to abandon Brexit – first in its hard form and, if necessary, in its entirety. That is the logic behind all the manoeuvres, all the cant and all the mea culpas you will see mainstream politicians and journalists perform this week. And the logic is sound. The Brexit referendum result was supposed to unleash Thatcherism 2.0 – corporate tax rates on a par with Ireland, human rights law weakened, and perpetual verbal equivalent of the Falklands war, only this time with Brussels as the enemy; all opponents of hard Brexit would be labelled the enemy within. But you can’t have any kind of Thatcherism if Corbyn is prime minister. Hence the frantic search for a fallback line. Those revolted by the stench of May’s rancid nationalism will now find it liberally splashed with the cologne of compromise. Labour has, quite rightly, tried to keep Karl Marx out of the election. But there is one Marxist whose work provides the key to understanding what just happened. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist leader who died in a fascist jail in 1937, would have had no trouble understanding Corbyn’s rise, Labour’s poll surge, or predicting what happens next. For Gramsci understood what kind of war the left is fighting in a mature democracy, and how it can be won. Consider the events of the past six weeks a series of unexpected plot twists. Labour starts out polling 25% but then scores 40%. Its manifesto is leaked, raising major questions of competence, but it immediately boosts Corbyn’s popularity. Britain is attacked by terrorists but it is the Tories whose popularity dips. Diane Abbott goes sick – yet her majority rises to 30,000. Sitting Labour candidates campaign on the premise “Corbyn cannot win” yet his presence delivers a 10% boost to their own majorities. None of it was supposed to happen. It defies political “common sense”. Gramsci was the first to understand that, for the working class and the left, almost the entire battle is to disrupt and defy this common sense. He understood that it is this accepted common sense – not MI5, special branch and the army generals – that really keeps the elite in power. Once you accept that, you begin to understand the scale of Corbyn’s achievement. Even if he hasn’t won, he has publicly destroyed the logic of neoliberalism – and forced the ideology of xenophobic nationalist economics into retreat. Brexit was an unwanted gift to British business. Even in its softest form it means 10 years of disruption, inflation, higher interest rates and an incalculable drain on the public purse. It disrupts the supply of cheap labour; it threatens to leave the UK as an economy without a market. But the British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers. The hard Brexit path creates a permanent crisis, permanent austerity and a permanent set of enemies – namely Brussels and social democracy. It is the perfect petri dish for the fungus of financial speculation to grow. But the British people saw through it. Corbyn’s advance was not simply a result of energising the Labour vote. It was delivered by an alliance of ex-Ukip voters, Greens, first-time voters and tactical voting by the liberal centrist salariat. The alliance was created in two stages. First, in a carefully costed manifesto Corbyn illustrated, for the first time in 20 years, how brilliant it would be for most people if austerity ended and government ceased to do the work of the privatisers and the speculators. Then, in the final week, he followed a tactic known in Spanish as la remontada – the comeback. He stopped representing the party and started representing the nation; he acted against stereotype – owning the foreign policy and security issues that were supposed to harm him. Day by day he created an epic sense of possibility. The ideological results of this are more important than the parliamentary arithmetic. Gramsci taught us that the ruling class does not govern through the state. The state, Gramsci said, is just the final strongpoint. To overthrow the power of the elite, you have to take trench after trench laid down in their defence. Last
Technoshamanism and wasted ontologies
http://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/2017/06/14/technoshamanism-and-wasted-ontologies/ /Interview with Fabiane M. Borges published on May 21, 2017^1 <#sdfootnote1sym>/ /By Bia Martins and Reynaldo Carvalho Translated by Carsten Agger/ In a state of permanent warfare and fierce disputes over visions of the future, /technoshamanism/ emerges as a resistance and as an endeavour to influence contemporary thinking, technological production, scientific questions, and everyday practices. This is how the Brazilian Ph.D. in clinical psychology, researcher and essayist /Fabiane M. Borges/ presents this international network of collaboration which unites academics, activists, indigenous people and many more people who are interested in a search for ideas and practices which go beyond the instrumental logic of capital. In this interview with Em Rede, she elaborates her reflections on shamanism as a technology for producing knowledge and indicates some of the experiences that were made in this context. – *At first, technology and shamanism seem like contradictory notions or at least difficult to combine. The first refers to the instrumental rationalism that underlies an unstoppable developmentalist project. The second makes you think of indigenous worldviews, healing rituals and altered states of consciousness. What is the result of this combination?* In a text that I wrote for the magazine /Geni^2 <#sdfootnote2sym>/ in 2015, I said this: that techno + shamanism has three quite evident meanings: 1. The technology of shamanism (shamanism seen as a technology for the production of knowledge); 2. The shamanism of technology (the pursuit of shamanic powers through the use of technology); 3. The combination of these two fields of knowledge historically obstructed by the Church and later by science, especially in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Each of these meanings unfolds into many others, but here is an attempt to discuss each one: 1) When we perceive shamanism not as tribal religions or as the beliefs of archaic people (as is still very common) but as a technology of knowledge production, we radically change the perception of its meaning. The studies of e.g. ayahuasca shows that intensified states of consciousness produces a kind of experience which reshapes the state of the body, broadening the spectrum of sensation, affection, and perception. These “plants of power” are probably that which brings us closest to the “magical thinking” of native communities and consequently to the shamanic consciousness e– that is, to that alternative ontology, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro alerts us when he refers to the Amerindian ontology in his book /Cannibal Metaphysics^3 <#sdfootnote3sym>/, or Davi Kopenawa with his shamanic education with /yakoana/, as described in /The Falling Sky^4 <#sdfootnote4sym>/. It is obviously not only through plants of power that we can access this ontology, but they are a portal which draws us singularly near this way of seeing the world, life itself. Here, we should consider the hypotheses of Jeremy Narby in his /The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and origins of knowledge/ where he explains that the indigenous knowledge of herbs, roots and medicine arises partly from dreams and from the effects of entheogens. When I say that shamanism is a technology of knowledge production, it is because it has its own methods for constructing narratives, mythologies, medicine and healing as well as for collecting data and creating artifacts and modes of existence, among other things. So this is neither ancient history nor obsolete – it lives on, pervading our technological and mass media controlled societies and becoming gradually more appreciated, especially since the 1960s where ecological movements, contact with traditional communities and ways of life as well as with psychoactive substances all became popular, sometimes because of the struggles of these communities and sometimes because of an increased interest in mainstream society. A question arose: If we were to recuperate these wasted ontologies with the help of these surviving communities and of our own ruins of narratives and experiences, would we not be broadening the spectrum of technology itself to other issues and questions? 2) The shamanism of technology. It is said that such theories as parallel universes, string theory and quantum physics, among others, bring us closer to the shamanic ontology than to the theological/capitalist ontology which guides current technological production. But although this current technology is geared towards war, pervasive control and towards over-exploitation of human, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial resources, we still possess a speculative, curious and procedural technology which seeks to construct hypotheses and open interpretations which are not necessarily committed to the logic of capital (this is the meaning of the free software, DIY and open source movements in the la
