Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Andreas Broeckmann]

please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".

-a

ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet 
other proportions.


pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and 
might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like 
"precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.



Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator):


https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened 




a flavour:
"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is 
associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which 
we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency 
depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a 
necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and 
political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of 
collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is 
always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental 
requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the 
/absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these 
ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is 
/never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ 
limits"


seán

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Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[Sean Cubitt]

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues by Daniel Ross (aka 
Stiegler’s translator):

https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened

a flavour:
"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is 
associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which we are 
confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency depends on 
recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a necessity whose 
impure technological, but also social, economic and political conditions are 
alone what make possible the exercise of collective intelligence, belief, 
wisdom and decision. The temptation is always to say that freedom and democracy 
are the fundamental requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet 
the absolute failure of the West over the past two years means that these ideas 
must absolutely be subjected to critique, where the latter is never a 
denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ limits"

seán


Seán 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&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W





The comprehensive crisis of neoliberalism may have unleashed creative 
intellectual energy even at the once-dead centre of politics. But an 
intellectual crisis does not a new era make. If it is energising to discover 
that we can afford anything we can actually do, it also puts us on the spot. 
What can and should we actually do? Who, in fact, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil demonstrate, democratic politics is taking on 
strange and unfamiliar new forms. Social inequalities are more, not less 
extreme. At least in the rich countries, there is no collective countervailing 
force. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply 
risks. The principal use to which our newfound financial freedom has been put 
are more and more grotesque efforts at financial stabilisation. The antagonism 
between the west and China divides huge chunks of the world, as not since the 
cold war. And now, in the form of Covid, the monster has arrived. The 
Anthropocene has shown its fangs ? on an as yet modest scale. Covid is far from 
being the worst of what we should expect ? 2020 was not the full alert. If we 
are dusting ourselves off and enjoying the recovery, we should reflect. Around 
the world the dead are unnumbered, but our best guess puts the figure at 10 
million. Thousands are dying every day. And 2020 was a wake-up call.

Adapted from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World?s Economy by Adam Tooze, 
published by Allen Lane on 7 September

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Just out: INC Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image

[Geert Lovink]

INC Reader #15 

Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image 

Edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw

Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, 
memes have passed the post-digital threshold and entered new theoretical, 
practical, and geographical territories beyond the stereotypical young, white, 
male, western subject. As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the 
mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical 
event will be haunted by its memetic double. Our responses to memes in the new 
decade demand an analogous virtuality.

This Critical Meme Reader features an array of researchers, activists, and 
artists who address the following questions. What is the current state of the 
meme producer? What are the semiotics of memes? How are memes involved in 
platform capitalism and how do they operate within the context of different 
mediascapes? How are memes used for political counter-strategies? Are memes 
moving beyond the image? How can memes be used to design the future? Will there 
ever be a last meme in history? Together, the contributors to this reader 
combine their global perspectives on meme culture to discuss memetic 
subjectivities and communities, the work of art in the age of memetic 
production, the post meme, meme warfare, and meme magic – varying from 
reflections on real-life experiences to meta meme theory.

Contributors: Crystal Abidin and Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Anirban K. Baishya, 
Aarushi Bapna and Ajitesh Lokhande, Luther Blissett, Grant Bollmer, Stephanie 
Boulding, Lesley Braun, Anthony Burton, Caspar Chan, Clusterduck, Åke Gafvelin, 
Idil Galip, Martin Hassen, Geoff Hondroudakis, Max Horwich, Yasmeen Khaja, Andy 
King, Ivan Knapp, Jacob Sujin Kuppermann, Anahita Neghabat, Sarp Özer, Saeeda 
Saeed, Laurence Scherz and The Trans Bears, Sabrina Ward-Kimola and Scott Wark.

Copy editor: Geoff Hondroudakis
Cover Design: Marijn Bril
Design and EPUB development: Chloë Arkenbout and Tomasso Campagna
Printing and binding: GPS Internationale Handels Holding GMBH
Cover font: Terminal Grotesque Regular by Raphaël Bastide (Velvetyne)

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2021

Contact
Email: viralimagecult...@networkcultures.org 

Web: www.networkcultures.org/viralimageculture 

Get the book here: 

Download .PDF here 

Download .ePub here 

Order a print copy here 



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Adam Tooze: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

[patrice riemens]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/02/covid-and-the-crisis-of-neoliberalism


Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

by Adam Tooze https://www.theguardian.com/profile/adam-tooze
The Guardian, Thursday 2 Sep 2021



If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between 
Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on 20 January 
2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States 
precisely a year later, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of 
12 months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions 
severely ill. Today the official death tolls stands at 4.51 million 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105 . The likely figure for excess deaths 
is more than twice that number. The virus disrupted the daily routine of 
virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, 
separated families, interrupted travel and upended the world economy.

To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses and 
markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the 
sharpest economic recession experienced since the second world war, it was 
qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, 
however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. 
It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no 
other 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene
 ”.

Even before we knew what would hit us, there was every reason to think that 
2020 might be tumultuous. The conflict between China and the US was boiling up. 
A “new cold war” was in the air. Global growth had slowed seriously in 2019. 
The IMF worried about the destabilising effect that geopolitical tension might 
have on a world economy that was already piled high with debt. Economists 
cooked up new statistical indicators to track the uncertainty that was dogging 
investment. The data strongly suggested that the source of the trouble was in 
the White House.
The US’s 45th president, Donald Trump 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump , had succeeded in turning 
himself into an unhealthy global obsession. He was up for reelection in 
November and seemed bent on discrediting the electoral process even if it 
yielded a win. Not for nothing, the slogan of the 2020 edition of the Munich 
Security Conference – the Davos for national security types – was 
“Westlessness”.

Apart from the worries about Washington, the clock on the Brexit 
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/eu-referendum  negotiations was running 
out. Even more alarming for Europe as 2020 began was the prospect of a new 
refugee crisis. In the background lurked both the threat of a final grisly 
escalation in Syria’s civil war and the chronic problem of underdevelopment. 
The only way to remedy that was to energise investment and growth in the global 
south. The flow of capital, however, was unstable and unequal. At the end of 
2019, half the lowest-income borrowers in sub-Saharan Africa were already 
approaching the point at which they could no longer service their debts.

The pervasive sense of risk and anxiety that hung around the world economy was 
a remarkable reversal. Not so long before, the west’s apparent triumph in the 
cold war, the rise of market finance, the miracles of information technology, 
and the widening orbit of economic growth appeared to cement the capitalist 
economy as the all-conquering driver of modern history. In the 1990s, the 
answer to most political questions had seemed simple: “It’s the economy, 
stupid.” As economic growth transformed the lives of billions, there was, 
Margaret Thatcher liked to say, “no alternative”. That is, there was no 
alternative to an order based on privatisation, light-touch regulation and the 
freedom of movement of capital and goods. As recently as 2005, Britain’s 
centrist prime minister Tony Blair could declare that to argue about 
globalisation 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/globalisation-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-idea-that-swept-the-world
  made as much sense as arguing about whether autumn should follow summer.

By 2020, globalisation and the seasons were very much in question. The economy 
had morphed from being the answer to being the question. A series of deep 
crises – beginning in Asia in the late 90s and moving to the Atlantic financial 
system in 2008, the eurozone in 2010 and global commodity producers in 2014 – 
had shaken confidence in market economics. All those crises had been overcome, 
but by government spending and central bank interventions that drove a coach 
and horses through firmly held precepts about “small government” and 
“independent” central banks. The crises had been brought on by speculation, and 
the scale of the interventions necessary to stabilise them had been hi