Re: How do we govern ourselves? (was: Mechanical Turkish)

[Brian Holmes]

Hello Blake -

I think you've made a nettime first by listing the points where we agree!
That's much appreciated. The list will likely stop right where it is, but
still, I'd like to expand my take on this point of disagreement:

Where we differ Brian, if I understand you correctly, is in where agency
> lies. I tried to make this point in our original exchange and put it this
> way in the synopsis posted to the list (just prior to the part you quoted):
> “shaking our fists at institutions has not proven to be very effective
> politically.”
>

Well, critique and protest are a moment or aspect of politics, but when
they do not produce results one is led to engage with other moments. Which
of them can generate agency? It may be useful to idealize the state, in
order to get a better grasp of its functions and possibilities, and a lot
of your effort seems to lie there, Blake. However, one also has to work
with real state institutions. What I've observed over the last twenty years
is the persistance of entrenched forms of power (industrial, financial,
military) and the extreme difficulty of bringing these powers to account in
the arena of the state, where norms are legislated and resources are
allocated. I think knowledge is one of the keys to collective agency, but
not the only one.

Whether it's ecological, military, racial or labor issues, nothing changes
until there is an applied understanding of the situation stretching from
the grassroots into the state, by way of professional and educational
milieus and then media (both mass media and narrowcast). The important word
here is applied understanding, which you can also call hands-on knowledge
or praxis. It means, for instance, that someone films a policeman killing
an unarmed person, then someone else (at first an individual, then a media
outlet) circulates that video, then someone else (first citizens, then
lawyers) defends the right to use it as evidence, then someone else (now in
the state) prosecutes the person who pulled the trigger, and further, yet
someone else (who is typically a member of a political party) runs for
attorney or mayor or governor. The state only comes in at the end of the
sequence; but all along it, people are at grips with the issues both
theoretically and operationally. Just as importantly, the people involved
relay their acts and their statements to each other, often very
deliberately, and the meaning of what they are doing is spread through the
educational and cultural circuits: that's solidarity in action.

What I've described above is the general formula of an effective
relationship of civil society to the state. More specifically, it is also
the central sequence of the "woke" politics connected to Black Lives
Matter. So even if there are other, less productive aspects to present-day
racial politics, I still don't get why you use the term "woke" so
negatively.

I'm a professional intellectual and artist and I want to be part of these
kinds of political sequences. What I now focus on in my own activities are
ecological questions that have become central to industrial societies and
that involve everyone as producers, consumers, or both. Long ago I realized
that people in the left-progressive-liberal spectrum (from the DSA to the
Dems, in the US context) were increasingly ignorant of industrial
production, which they simultaneously critique and depend on. Here I do see
an excess of critique over applied understanding, which I think is one of
your concerns. So anyway, with Marx on my side I became a lot more curious
about the how, who, when, where and why of industrial production, and when
I returned to the States I realized this could be seamlessly extended to
agriculture. To get at least one step beyond the relative insignificance of
a private person who writes essays and makes maps, I have helped found art
groups in the Midwest such as the Compass and Deep Time Chicago, which
among other things investigate, as publicly as possible, the how, who,
when, where, and why of industrial production. I'd suggest that coal, oil
and uranium are the most widely shared vectors of social violence (I am
employing them right now). Corn and soybeans are not so directly connected
to war as energy products, but they are just as connected to climate change
and they mark out still more common ground where both individual behavior
and public policy really matter. One can rightly accuse particular
corporate and financial actors of making things worse in these domains (a
number of them they really do) but any substantial transformation of the
status quo has to be systemic and requires collective changes in behavior
compelled by binding norms. There's a tremendous field of struggle here,
and in my roles as an artist and intellectual I find that both the
affective presence and the conceptual framing of the material practices
involved are crucial to making those struggles effectively political.

Many criticize the term Anthropocene for minimizing the role 

Re: I farted

[walter palmetshofer]

On 2018-02-01 11:53, Felix Stalder wrote:

This analogy is wrong.


Trafalgar not Krojanty.

Charge at Krojanty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty
.DE vs. .PL
killed: 11 vs. 19 - 25
wounded: 9 vs. 40 - 50

Battle of Trafalgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar
.FR&.ES vs. UK
casualties & losses: 13.781 vs. 1.666
ships lost: 22 vs. 0

Same up shit creek without a paddle situation is currently unfolding in 
Austria.

#  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: I farted

[tbyfield]

Spector's gesture may have seemed 'well played' to a few people on on a 
few social networks for few days, but beyond that its impact can only be 
neagtive. During a lull in high-pressure federal budget negotiations, a 
posh museum curator insults a famously thin-skinned president who (a) 
has a penchant for crushing his enemies and (b) rules by pouring 
gasoline on smoldering culture-war issues — what could possibly go 
wrong?


We learned what can go wrong in the '80s and '90s, when 'art' was 
hijacked by a handful of attention-seeking pottymouths. But the main 
result wasn't to establish that the work of Karen Finley or Andres 
Serrano is brilliant or enduring. Maybe it is, I don't really care. But 
we do know that arts programs of every kind across the US suffered 
savage budget cuts — and reactionaries gained a whole new range of 
weapons to pursue their agenda.


But isn't it a bit odd that we'd be debating it in these terms on 
nettime now? The list's roots lie, in part, in the recognition that huge 
swaths of contemporary art had collapsed into irrelevance — part 
theory, part commodity, part ritual, part soap opera. Morlock suggests 
this is a 'perfect illustration of the dismal state of what once was the 
progressive left (20 years ago?)' — but 20 years go we were saying 20 
years before, ad nauseam.


Think for a moment about the range of freedoms Spector had, the 
resources she could have drawn on, to create some interesting or 
challenging situation — *exactly* the origins of this list. Instead, 
she decides to relive the golden moments from her youth.


Cheers,
Ted


On 1 Feb 2018, at 12:03, Keith Sanborn wrote:

I give the Guggenheim some credit, though the Cattelano is a cynical 
piece of crap anyway. The ironies there are instructive. Where is a 
more fitting home for it than in the bathroom of a racist who is 
obsessed with gold?


And if both analogies are correct, then farting in the Fueher’s face 
is not an opportunity to be missed. It’s on his level.

#  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: I farted

[Keith Hart]

On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:

> This analogy is wrong.
>
> The better one might be the Polish cavalry charging against German tanks
> in September 1939. Impeccable in style, even scoring a micro-victory,
> but no match to the forces just unleashed.


Morlock came closer than horses against Panzers. At least the Polish
cavalry were bravely defending their country, however ineptly. This lady is
like a courtier who uses the manners of her class to disguise that it was
she who farted during the king's speech. It was a sly put down for the
benefit of cultural insiders and was never intended to achieve anything
politically. In that she probably succeeded.

Keith

>
>
> #  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:
>
#  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: I farted

[Felix Stalder]

This analogy is wrong.

The better one might be the Polish cavalry charging against German tanks
in September 1939. Impeccable in style, even scoring a micro-victory,
but no match to the forces just unleashed.

Felix



On 2018-02-01 00:02, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> From: Nancy specter
>> Sent: Friday, September 15, 2017 8:18 AM
>> To: Smithi Donna A.-- --
>> Subject: Request for a loan from the Guggenhelm
>>
>>
>> Dear Donna Hayashi Smith,
>>
>> Many thanks for your request to the Guggenheim Museum to borrow Vincent
> 
> The narrative boils down to: POTUS invited me for a breakfast, and I
> farted during the breakfast. Gimme high-fives! We are The Resistance!
> 
> Which makes it the perfect illustration of the dismal state of what once
> was the progressive left (20 years ago?) These days they are proud of
> farting. A sublime symbolic act ... the Art of Fart!
> 
> 
> 
> #  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:
> 

-- 

 | http://felix.openflows.com
 |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC



signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  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:

How money is failing

[Rasmus Fleischer]

Here follows a brief talk that I held yesterday at the opening of
Transmediale.
It connects the festival theme of "face value" to a theme I am exploring in
a (yet unfunded) research project together with fellow economic historian
Daniel Berg, and also to an essay on money I wrote for the Swedish magazine
Glänta. Here stripped down to fit a five minute talk.

 - Rasmus

\ \ \ \ \

Let me talk about how money is failing.

With this, I don't mean we have too little of it, nor that we have too much
of it (although both things might be true).
The failure is not in the lack of one common currency, nor in the lack of a
thousand alternative currencies.
No, the failure of money is a failure to establish a stable line of
connection between the past, the present and the future.

Here and now, money works perfectly well. It works as a medium of
capitalist coercion. Every single day, we all have to get and to spend
money. That means work. That means capitalism.

We now celebrate 10 years since the last financial breakdown. So how did it
all work out? Did capitalism recover or not? Is the economy growing or
shrinking? And do workers today earn more or less, compared to workers one
generation before?

The answers are not given. They all depend on how we measure the mysterious
substance of money: the purchasing power. This measuring is done with a
special device, called a price index.
The price index is that very timeline which makes it possible to read the
economy through time. This statistic stands at the centre of all kinds of
accounting, of policymaking, and of history writing.

The indexing of prices was never without complications. But only today, it
is becoming apparent how profoundly metaphysical it is – that leap from
nominal value to real value.

Why is it metaphysical? Because it is never enough to just measure the
price of stuff, when the stuff itself is not the same from year to year.
So for every new model of a smartphone, for every new digital service
disrupting this or that, the statistics office must try to measure also the
change in quality.
They must quantify in monetary terms if the new product represents an
improvement or a deterioration, compared to what was available before.
This is done from the standpoint of a fictitious consumer, who does not
only have no class and no gender, but who is also able to travel in time
with unchanged preferences.
I am not kidding. This is how national accounts are made. When those small
"quality adjustments" add up, they determine in what colours we will see
the economy at large.

So far, it seems like this fictitious consumer has been in love with new
technology. No attempts are made to adjust for the downsides. No statistics
office, as far as I know, has tried to calculate the effect of advertising,
distraction or surveillance as negative qualities.
Yet, every new feature added to smartphones, for every acceleration of
computing power, has been reflected in the price index as increases in the
purchasing power of money.

Today, even mainstream economists are questioning the official price index.
But they question it on the grounds that it should be even more optimistic.
They think that the digital revolution brings so much more utility to us,
that is not yet captured in numbers.
So may it be. But you could just as well adjust the numbers in the opposite
direction.

Right now, we see how the critique of social media is becoming mainstream.
If this critique reaches all the way into the statistics office, they would
have to adjust the whole price index, affecting all statistics that rely on
it. That could actually throw the world economy in a much darker light.

My point is not that one picture is more right than the other.
Rather, that money itself is moving beyond measure.
It is failing as a medium to compare economic conditions over time.
Personalized pricing is certainly not making it easier.
Let's face it – no kind of alternative money will solve that puzzle.
There is not one true way to account for economic change.
So let us draw the consequences.

Let's expose economics as the most relativist of sciences.

Let's forget the idea of a basic income given in money, as there can never
be a guarantee for what a given sum of money can buy.

Let's learn together how to talk about inequality in terms that are not
monetary, just like we have learned how to talk about justice without
reference to a god.

Money does exist. It is a medium of power. But it is not a suitable medium
for redistribution, and not for envisioning a common future.
#  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: