Re: Morales Longa, Vita Brevis

[Frederic Neyrat]

thanks for sharing - excerpt:

These findings suggest the hopeful possibility that we can encourage the
development and maintenance of cultural worldviews that emphasise commonalities
rather than differences between individuals and foster tolerance of such
differences.


thus the only to defeat fascism/eco-fascism/reactive nationalism, etc. is
not to show its flaws/lyings/badness, or to "impeach" it etc. but to
propose a Great narrative/political horizon/an idea of the Common, a common
= X, whatever the way we frame it. Accumulating identities, intersectioning
them, won't be enough, I think.

My best,

F.



__
Website: Atopies 


On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 4:33 AM  wrote:

>
> Memento Mori, existential dread, in the not so long run, you are gonna be
> dead!
> Salam, El Iblis Shah.
>
> #digitalunconscious


<>



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Re: Facebook / MZ, "trust," and "mythic forces"

[Frederic Neyrat]

Thanks Geoffrey, indeed, illuminating!

Yet I also try to get the other part of it, i.e. the "trust"/belief aspect
that the "Dumb fucks" description cannot grasp at all.
I think I understand who MZ is, no doubt, and that Libra is an antiphrasis.
I also know that MZ doesn't know where his power comes from, but he's able
to use it very well. To know how to use something doesn't mean knowing what
this thing is, knowing for instance - as Walter Benjamin says in his
*Arcades* project, that capitalism is a "reactivation of mythic forces" [K,
391]. Without a redirection of these "mythic forces" (or whatever we call
them), MZ will be powerful *ad vitam aeternam*.

My best,

FN



On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 2:17 PM Geoffrey Goodell  wrote:

> P.S. I should have included a link to an article I co-authored about
> Facebook
> Libra:
>
> https://ssrn.com/abstract=3441707
>
> Abstract:
>
> The announcement by Facebook that Libra will "deliver on the promise of
> 'the
> internet of money'" has drawn the attention of the financial world.
> Regulators,
> institutions, and users of financial products have all been prompted to
> react
> and, so far, no one managed to convince the association behind Libra to
> apply
> the brakes or to convince regulators to stop the project altogether. In
> this
> article, we propose that Libra might be best seen not as a financial
> newcomer,
> but as a critical enabler for Facebook to acquire a new source of personal
> data. By working with financial regulators seeking to address concerns with
> money laundering and terrorism, Facebook can position itself for privileged
> access to high-assurance digital identity information. For this reason,
> Libra
> merits the attention of not only financial regulators, but also the state
> actors that are concerned with reputational risks, the rule of law, public
> safety, and national defence.
>
> On Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 08:13:13PM +, Geoffrey Goodell wrote:
> > This pithy exchange attributed to Mark Zuckerberg [1,2] might illuminate
> the
> > issue:
> >
> > Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> >
> > Zuck: Just ask.
> >
> > Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> >
> > [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> >
> > Zuck: People just submitted it.
> >
> > Zuck: I don't know why.
> >
> > Zuck: They "trust me"
> >
> > Zuck: Dumb fucks.
> >
> > ---
> >
> > Later, in an interview with David Kirkpatrick [3], Mark Zuckerberg
> proclaimed
> > his view on privacy:
> >
> > "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of
> integrity."
> >
> > I'm inclined to agree with Michael Zimmer's assessment [4]:
> >
> > "Zuckerberg and those who surround him tend to be relentlessly
> forward-looking
> > on privacy: The issue for them is not how to protect users’ current
> sense of
> > privacy but to shape their willingness to share in the future."
> >
> > ---
> >
> > If we imagine that there are some people who stand to benefit from this
> > dystopia we are building, or others who think that they stand to benefit
> > because they have not considered the implications of this new emerging
> morality
> > in which common people are transparent but powerful interests have many
> faces,
> > then we can see how Facebook and its progeny might seem inevitable, or
> even a
> > necessary antidote to the fatigue of the modern world.
> >
> > Enjoy the links, they tell a more complete story than I ever could.
> >
> > Best wishes --
> >
> > Geoff
> >
> > [1] http://www.bitsbook.com/2010/05/mark-z-grow-up/
> >
> > [2]
> https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5
> >
> > [3] David Kirkpatrick, _The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the
> Company
> > That Is Connecting the World_.  Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition
> (June
> > 8, 2010), ISBN-13: 978-1439102114.
> >
> > [4]
> http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2008/11/18/do-you-trust-this-face-gq-on-mark-zuckerberg/
> >
> > On Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 10:28:01AM -0600, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
> > > environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
> > > Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this
> > > "social

Re: Facebook

[Frederic Neyrat]

thanks! Sorry, i don't' get it:

social media is too vast to accurately
assess.

but to assess - what?

my best,

fn

On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 12:22 PM { brad brace }  wrote:

>
> [my posts to nettime don't get circulated unless there's a
> note like this one]
>
> To be brief: I'd say social media is too vast to accurately
> assess.
>
> /:b
>
>
> On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
> > environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
> > Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this
> > "social" (?) network.
> >
> > This article
> >
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-republicans-right
> > is not the reason of my email, but its occasion.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your light on this matter,
> >
> > Frederic Neyrat
> >
>
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Re: Facebook

[Frederic Neyrat]

Thanks Alan! But I've a question, I try to formulate it... Let's say:

1/ FB enables to create a "community," that's good for sure;
2/ but in the same time, it destroys the condition of the possibility of
community/togetherness/Gemeinwesen/être-ensemble, etc. For instance, in
making possible the election of people whose main goal is to destroy any
community/being-in-common (note that I do not consider being quantified and
recombined by algorithms a good way to generate some being-in-common).

So, in the end, I understand that something would be lost by leaving FB -
hence my first question! - but would it be possible to say that the loss is
even more important while not quitting FB?

My best,

FN

On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 11:14 AM Alan Sondheim  wrote:

>
>
> I'm on it because there are a number of new media artists/writers/etc.
> including myself who form somewhat of a community - it's a way to
> distribute work, especially if one's not in academia or media industry.
> It's brutally flawed but also useful and it gives more scope to textual
> work than Instagram.
>
> Alan
>
> On Sun, 3 Nov 2019, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
> > environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
> Facebook
> > and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this "social" (?)
> > network.
> >
> > Thisarticle?
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-
> > republicans-right
> > is not the reason of my email, but its occasion.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your light on this matter,
> >
> > Frederic Neyrat
> >
> >
> >
>
> web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552
> current text http://www.alansondheim.org/wm.txt
>
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Re: Facebook

[Frederic Neyrat]

Thanks for your answer!

My best,

FN

On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 10:49 AM José María Mateos 
wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 10:28:01AM -0600, Frederic Neyrat wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
> >environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
> >Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this
> >"social" (?) network.
>
> I've been off Facebook (see caveats below), but the reasons people
> typically have to stay there are essentially that it provides a useful
> way of communicating with either a close circle of friends and family,
> and to broadcast opinions to the world. And that utility is above all
> other considerations. Is it used to wage psychological warfare on its
> users? Sure, but of course it doesn't affect them, only other people.
>
> As I said, I don't have a Facebook account anymore, but keep close
> contact with said friends and family using WhatsApp groups, which
> belongs to Facebook, am I then out of Facebook entirely? I don't think
> so. Would I like to use a different system/app/protocol/whatever?
> Definitely, but I can't force everybody else to move; we're basically
> stuck there due to the network effect.
>
> I am now the weird friend that from time to time shoots an e-mail; I'm
> glad to say that it works, and that people tend to take it more
> seriously than a Facebook message. As for broadcasting, I  use a blog.
> Do people read it? Barely, but at least what I post there is published
> under my rules.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org/
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Facebook

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi,

I'd like to know if some people on this list - be they activists,
environmentalists, artists, thinkers, contributors - are (still) on
Facebook and if yes, why, being given the extreme noxiousness of this
"social" (?) network.

This article
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/03/facebook-politics-republicans-right
is not the reason of my email, but its occasion.

Thanks in advance for your light on this matter,

Frederic Neyrat
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Present, past, amnesia, and rearview mirror

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi Garnet, yes, you're right, fuck the fetishization, and we need to pay
attention to other forms of thought, "minor" (in the Deleuzian & Guattarian
sense... sorry...) thinkers; yet let's be careful to not produce a total
amnesia, like people who would write as if nothing was written before them,
shouting "Voilà!" about something already written/explained/defined one
thousand times before them. Not bad sometimes to take a look into the
rearview mirror.

A gesture of rejection of the past is a gesture kept repeated. "Modern" and
dangerous.

Besides, even a reading of neglected writers has to make appear that which
was not written, or read - it's the same thing - "to read what was never
written" (Hofmannsthal). Hermeneutics anyway.

So, let's read Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Alexis Pauline
Gumbs "with the most powerful force of the present" (Nietzsche).

Best,

Frederic Neyrat

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 9:07 AM Garnet Hertz  wrote:

> Emaline: based on your response, it looks like you have the same careerism
> as Seb. No?
>
> 1. Why would anybody use the term "imbricated" in a tweet without being
> insecure?
> https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/
> 2. I don't hate Foucault and Deleuze (I did my PhD w Mark Poster, perhaps
> one of the bigger fans of these guys) - but thinking that advanced thought
> starts and stops with these people is totally lazy scholarship.
> 3. Max Herman: "I sometimes think the flaws or errors in three main names
> -- Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche". Sounds okay, but is about a hundred years
> late.
> 4. Seb may be trying to keep academia alive, but this sort of resembles a
> zombie life form that isn't worth the life support.
>
> I think I'm primarily gagging at a fetishization of the same group of guys
> that everybody worships: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze,
> Guattari, Jameson, etc. It's totally true that they really are fantastic: I
> think I literally have every printed word of all of these people on my
> bookshelf. I also still consider Baudrillard the best theoretical summary
> of my life's work, for example -- his writing is amazingly inspiring and
> bright. But by continuing to worship the same incantation of sacred names
> we really run the risk of our outfit (critical studies, digital humanities,
> or whatever) of becoming totally irrelevant and disconnected from the tools
> and dialogue of today. In my opinion, if your scholarship is focused on Freud,
> Marx, and Nietzsche then maybe you're in a stagnant nostalgic backwater of
> thought. There are so many new tools, techniques and scholars that bring so
> many fresh perspectives on different topics that we need to dig down and do
> work on instead of just taking for granted the names that our grad advisors
> assigned us. If nothing else, we really owe it to the non-European and
> non-male scholars around us that have done fantastic, vigorous scholarship.
> If we're writing theory or history it's up to us to dig deeper into the
> archive of this stuff and put the effort to find people outside the canon
> and write them into history. This is what great historians do, I think.
> They worry less about careerism and focus on paying attention to what is
> actually going on in the real world - and they formulate a fantastic way to
> summarize the gestalt of it without leaning on a bunch of clichés. They cut
> a fresh and insightful path. If nothing else, your long term careerism will
> accelerate by stepping out of your theoretical safe zone. Fuck Freud,
> Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Jameson -- not that
> they're wrong, but that there are a lot of other people that deserve our
> attention that have been totally neglected. The well-known folks had enough
> coverage already - they are useful in establishing a base zone for your
> arguments, but I really think all of these individuals would agree with me
> in moving forward. I think they'd say "Move on and clue in to what's
> happening now" -- or maybe encouraging us to not totally fetishize May 1968.
>
> In summary, I'd like to try to encourage people to be more like an
> inspirational groundbreaker than a careerist schmuck, I guess. Only a few
> beyond the small circle of critical studies colleagues genuinely care about
> the chain of thought between Freud-Marx-Nietzsche. Not that they're
> useless, but that a lot has happened since they were writing. We're in a
> significantly different world than when these folks were around. The work
> isn't completely useless, just not the best set of tools for discussing the
> problems of today. No?
>
>

Re: Ben Quinn: Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert (Guardian)

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi Nina,

I understand your point, but the *Guardian*'s article says that:

 "Julian Assange  is
showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to
psychological torture and should not be extradited to the US, according to
a senior UN expert who visited him in prison.


Whatever Assange has done, he should not be tortured, correct?

My best,

FN


On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 6:13 AM "Nina Temporär"  wrote:

>
> "In the course of the past nine years, Mr Assange has been exposed to
> persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging ….. from deliberate
> collective ridicule, insults and humiliation...“
>
> Seriously?
>
> Little reminder:
> "Part of the problem is that there is two women. If there was one, you
> could go:
> 'She is a bad woman'. I think this would have happened by now. 'This
> person is a
> bad character, bad faith, and here is evidence that points to it.'
> Because there is two,
> it is much harder."
> (Julian Assange in "Risk" by Laura Poitras, around min. 28)
>
>
> *** Freedom for the whistleblowers - No to extradition - But for a more
> differentiated coverage of the topic ***
>
> *Gesendet:* Freitag, 31. Mai 2019 um 12:24 Uhr
> *Von:* "Patrice Riemens" 
> *An:* nettim...@kein.org
> *Betreff:*  Ben Quinn: Julian Assange shows psychological
> torture symptoms, says UN expert (Guardian)
> Original to:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/31/julian-assange-shows-psychological-torture-symptoms-says-un-expert
>
>
> Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert
> UK government urged not to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder to US where he
> faces decades in prison
>
> Ben Quinn, The Guardian, Fri 31 May 2019.
>
>
> Julian Assange is showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged
> exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited to the
> US, according to a senior UN expert who visited him in prison.
>
> Nils Melzer, UN’s special rapporteur on torture, is expected to make his
> appeal to the UK government on Friday. It comes after Assange, the
> co-founder of WikiLeaks, was said by his lawyers to be too ill to appear
> by video link for the latest court hearing of the case on Thursday.
>
> Assange has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison, London,
> where he has been serving a 50-week sentence for skipping bail while
> fighting extradition to the US. He is accused of violating the Espionage
> Act by publishing secret documents containing the names of confidential
> US military and diplomatic sources.
>
> After meeting Assange earlier this month in the company of medical
> experts who examined him, Melzer will say on Friday that he fears the
> Australian’s human rights could be seriously violated if he is
> extradited to the US and will condemn what he describes as the
> “deliberate and concerted abuse inflicted for years” on him.
>
> Assange was arrested in April after Ecuador revoked his political asylum
> and invited police inside the country’s Knightsbridge diplomatic
> premises, where he had sought refuge in 2012 to avoid extradition to
> Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied.
>
> “Physically there were ailments but that side of things are being
> addressed by the prison health service and there was nothing urgent or
> dangerous in that way,” Melzer said.
>
> “What was worrying was the psychological side and his constant anxiety.
> It was perceptible that he had a sense of being under threat from
> everyone. He understood what my function was but it’s more that he was
> extremely agitated and busy with his own thoughts. It was difficult to
> have a very structured conversation with him.”
>
> Melzer said that Belmarsh was an old prison and had issues about that
> but he described it as well maintained, adding that characterisations of
> it as a “supermax” or “the Guantanamo of Britain” were unhelpful. While
> it does have a high-security wing Melzer said that Assange was not in
> that section.
>
> The lawyer, who receives 10 to 15 requests each day from sources asking
> for him to get involved, said that his office had been approached by
> Assange’s lawyers in December. But he said that he was initially
> reluctant to do so, admitting he was affected by what he called the
> “prejudice” around the case.
>
> However, he began looking into the case again in March and, earlier this
> week, wrote letters to the foreign ministers of the US, the UK and
> Sweden.
>
> “In the course of the past nine years, Mr Assange has been exposed to
> persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial
> persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his
> oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy,
> and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to
> open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his
> assassination,” Melzer will say on Friday.
>
> He added the UK authorities had con

Re: Fascist "trolls" and back on track

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi Iain,

You're right about the "deep intergenerational transmission of a culture of
resistance."

About the anecdote, just some context: the journalist was asking this
question in reminding Macron's "Make the planet great again" vs "Make the
USA great again," so the interviewed person was explaining that it's
necessary to, first, make the USA great again in order to, second, save the
planet. This is then that the the interviewee used the analogy, doing so
putting Europa in the position of a child and the USA in a parent
position... Nationalism, I think, we can call that, "right"?

And concerning the oxygen mask: let's hope it will not take too much time
to find it.

All the best,

Frederic

On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 10:45 PM Iain Boal  wrote:

> Frédéric:  You say "To be a rightist is the opposite way: me first; then,
> maybe, the world (I heard on France Info (French radio) someone in Texas
> saying: First, the USA, then the planet; "it's like parents in a plane:
> first;, they put on the oxygen mask; then, they can take care of children"-
> that's the essence of the right)."
>
> Putting on an oxygen mask is, surely, not a case of ‘me first’ but simply
> the condition of possibility of taking care of the children. I’ve rejected
> positing this kind of scenario - favored by Jesuits and other specialists
> in situation ethics - even since I was required to argue, in a ‘balloon
> debate’ at school, the case for throwing overboard one of the following:
>  the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Queen Mother or Mahatma Gandhi.
>
> In general, I don’t believe we get to the essence of human nature or
> political allegiance by studying - or imagining - people’s reactions *in
> extremis*. In any case the remarkable story of the Chamonnais under Nazi
> occupation, told by Philip Hallie in *Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The
> Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There*,
> offers a profound challenge to any glib account of the relation between
> politics and morality, and attests to the power of deep intergenerational
> transmission of a culture of resistance.
>
> Iain
>
> 
>
> Hi Dan, hi Angela,
>
> Thanks for your posts.
>
> Just an idea about morals and politics:
>
> - When the most important thing is me, myself, my identity, my job, my
> work, my resentment, my religion, etc., we are in the realm of morals and
> revenges and trials (and lawyers and money and punishments) reign;
> - I would say that politics begins when I speak about a situation that
> does not concern me first, but someone else, a stranger, a foreigner, an
> embodiment of gender or sexuality that is not *exactly* mine (it has not
> to be completely other, of course).
>
> So politics begins with an *impossible* identification, and it is this
> impossibility that is the proof that a real plurality, not a homogeneous
> community but an heterogeneous assemblage, is at stake. It is also the
> proof that I don't speak *for* but *with* someone else.
>
> I try to remember what Spivak says about the subalterns, it's something
> like: speaking instead of subalterns is maintaining the voiceless, but
> considering that their situation is their business only is also a way to
> maintain oppression. A double bind that has to be negotiated, and undone,
> in every specific situation.
>
> Another recollection: Deleuze saying that to be a leftist is to begin with
> "le lointain," the world, the horizon, what is far away, and then, only in
> a second moment, we can see how that concerns my situation. To be a
> rightist is the opposite way: me first; then, maybe, the world (I heard on
> France Info (French radio) someone in Texas saying: First, the USA, then
> the planet; "it's like parents in a plane: first;, they put on the oxygen
> mask; then, they can take care of children"- that's the essence of the
> right).
>
> In solidarity,
>
> Frédéric
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 7:13 PM Angela Mitropoulos 
> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 11:30, Dan S. Wang  wrote:
>>
>>> The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
>>> afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,
>>
>>
>>  Dan,
>>
>> I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and
>> politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms
>> more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity
>> politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.
>>
>> I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is
>> depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment
>> of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through
>> more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And
>> your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or
>> "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly
>> in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the form

Re: Fascist "trolls" and back on track

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi Dan, hi Angela,

Thanks for your posts.

Just an idea about morals and politics:

- When the most important thing is me, myself, my identity, my job, my
work, my resentment, my religion, etc., we are in the realm of morals and
revenges and trials (and lawyers and money and punishments) reign;
- I would say that politics begins when I speak about a situation that does
not concern me first, but someone else, a stranger, a foreigner, an
embodiment of gender or sexuality that is not *exactly* mine (it has not to
be completely other, of course).

So politics begins with an *impossible* identification, and it is this
impossibility that is the proof that a real plurality, not a homogeneous
community but an heterogeneous assemblage, is at stake. It is also the
proof that I don't speak *for* but *with* someone else.

I try to remember what Spivak says about the subalterns, it's something
like: speaking instead of subalterns is maintaining the voiceless, but
considering that their situation is their business only is also a way to
maintain oppression. A double bind that has to be negotiated, and undone,
in every specific situation.

Another recollection: Deleuze saying that to be a leftist is to begin with
"le lointain," the world, the horizon, what is far away, and then, only in
a second moment, we can see how that concerns my situation. To be a
rightist is the opposite way: me first; then, maybe, the world (I heard on
France Info (French radio) someone in Texas saying: First, the USA, then
the planet; "it's like parents in a plane: first;, they put on the oxygen
mask; then, they can take care of children"- that's the essence of the
right).

In solidarity,

Frédéric


On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 7:13 PM Angela Mitropoulos 
wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 11:30, Dan S. Wang  wrote:
>
>> The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
>> afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,
>
>
>  Dan,
>
> I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and
> politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms
> more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity
> politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.
>
> I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is
> depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment
> of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through
> more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And
> your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or
> "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly
> in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the former's claim of
> universality was challenged. I don't see how this could be described as
> depoliticisiing so much as the very opposite: heightened conflict,
> including over the use of resources, and labour (which presumably also
> includes things like enormous pay disparaties, sexual harassment which
> involves employers and coworkers treating other workers' bodies as their
> unlimited property, and so on).
>
> As to the separate issue of the way this heightened conflict is handled, I
> think there are better explanations than Millennials are doing it wrong.
>
> There is a longstanding approach that treats fascism as if it were a
> variety of sin (the Catholic philosopher Girard, for instance). I could not
> disagree more with that understanding of fascism, or politics more
> generally. But with regard to the US, the growing influence of evangelicals
> and religious conservatism more generally has tended to displace a concept
> of people doing awful things that people can change with a concept of good
> and evil. This is hardly down to Millennials. At the same time,
> evangelicals and conservative Catholics have adopted a pretty selective,
> exculpatory response to awful things that powerful people (powerful white
> men) do, which suspends judgement because only God can posthumously judge
> what is in someone's heart etc. It's obviously highly selective, given the
> growth of mass incarceration, extra-legal and legitimated violence, that
> has been directed, in the main, against black people, people of colour
> (think border violence), and women.
>
> Add to this the way in which a younger generation have been thrown to the
> wolves as a consequence of increasingly precarious conditions of work and
> highly restrictive conditions on welfare, I am not surprised that part of
> the pushback involves an insistence on the powerful being held to account
> for their actions. *In this world.* I disagree, strongly with moral
> economic theories (Catholics like Polanyi and Mouffe peddle this mysticism
> far more than any Millennial). But I can't bring myself to fault young
> people for insisting on accountability and change.
>
> best,
> Angela
>
>
>
>
>
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mai

"Let the dead bury the dead"

[Frederic Neyrat]

Brian wrote: "How to let the nationalist-populist dead bury their dead,
while we move on to the urgent question of living under twenty-first
century conditions?"

And of course I think / we think about:

"Let the dead bury the dead and mourn them. In contrast, it is enviable to
be the
first to enter upon a new life: this shall be our lot."

- Marx to Ruge, 1843


So let's pray that we're in 1843 or so. Meanwhile: https://alienocene.com/
and especially:https://alienocene.com/2018/10/23/a-communism-of-ghosts/

F.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 2:46 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 8:56 AM Ian Alan Paul 
> wrote:
>
> To romanticize the analysis of a past/outdated Marx as being universal without
>> being attentive to the distinct material/historical forces that define
>> the present is perhaps the most anti-Marxist position you could take.
>>
>
> The Communist Manifesto is an extraordinary text, on that everyone agrees,
> yet for some strange reason almost no one is aware that it was written on
> the basis of two years worth of debates within the Communist League, which
> was a clandestine working-class organization founded in London by
> continental exiles. So apparently it took all that time and all that
> engagement for individuals of genius to produce such a resonant
> collectivist text. Now, those in the Communist League were mainly artisans
> if I have understood right - a very specific kind of identity, later
> understood as the "aristocracy of labor" when assembly-line mass production
> came in and the whole notion of working class had to be reshaped on the
> basis of new experiences. A continuously changing reality means that the
> search to find and help co-create a transformative agency is always
> ongoing, a perpetual work-in-progress.
>
> Today in my view, any approach to a universal agency of struggle would
> have to take into account, not only labor and the relationship to the
> owners, but far more broadly, the relation of human beings to technology as
> a force both productive and destructive. This is very far from Marx, who
> believed that machines had an inherent progressive force and merely needed
> to be wrested from their owners and repurposed to create an even more
> productive egalitarian society. Nothing has shown Marx's belief to be true,
> alas. Instead, the destructive side of technology now threatens the very
> foundation of social and natural reproduction: the biogeochemical cycles of
> the Earth. Which brings me to Frederic's statement:
>
> "A universal subject could have been the green one, the wretched of the
> Earth (aka Gaia); but it did not happen, or its advent is, like, buried in
> a national-populist grave."
>
> We await the advent of a collective subject who finds agency in a
> transformation of the technological dialogue that humanity maintains with
> the Earth. Today we stand only at the beginning of that period in which the
> human species, along with most others, faces what Clive Hamilton calls a
> "defiant Earth" -- that is, an Earth that self-defensively responds to the
> current onslaught of technology, especially but not only CO2. The forms of
> oppression that capitalist technology creates are now mediated by the
> oceans, the atmosphere, the ice-caps, the jet stream, with very real and
> specific returns in the guise of what used to be called "the weather." What
> kind of genius - or what new figure of collective intellectual capacity -
> would it take to go among the suffering identities of the oppressed, feel
> the damage of climate change and the entire global capitalist social
> structure that it expresses, and listen for the words, the images, the
> experiences, the reference-points and the dreams, the aspirations, the
> hopes that could bring people together to transform the ways that
> technology is currently deployed? How to let the nationalist-populist dead
> bury their dead, while we move on to the urgent question of living under
> twenty-first century conditions?
>
> It's not a rhetorical question. Or rather, it's the most rhetorical
> question of them all. The defiant Earth has only begun to smash
> technological cities. The upsurge of regressive national-populism proves
> that there is no "natural" response; instead, every response is political.
> Just tossing around old Marxist catchwords is useless, because it does
> nothing like what Marx and Engels actually did. Namely, work directly with
> oppressed people in the first phases of political organization, and create
> new concepts, new images, new rhetoric that enables collective agency
> rather than imprisoning it in the dead-ends of the past.
>
> Storms, droughts, heat waves, crop failures and rising seas are bringing
> formidable challenges that cannot be resolved, for the majority of people
> anyway, by inherently exclusive capitalist self-protection techniques.
> National-populism, based on the nineteenth-century nationalism of war as a
> self-protection and self-aggrandizement s

Re: (no subject)

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Brian,

I totally agree with you, as usual. I'd like to highlight your last
sentence: "What we are missing is a theory of social relations in the
future" - but, let me play with your sentence, what future? A universal
subject could have been the green one, the wretched of the Earth (aka
Gaia); but it did not happen, or its advent is, like, buried in a
national-populist grave. At least we have his/her ghost, the ghost of the
collective that could have been able to embody the planetary exploited
subject. Not sure this ghost dares to haunt us. (Okay, I read too much Mark
Fisher these days...)

Best,

Frédéric

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:00 AM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 8:48 AM ari  wrote:
>
>> Does an understanding of politics as transformative action not clash with
>> one of it as a practice of belonging?
>>
>
> Certainly not. The whole Marxist tradition conceived of class
> consciousness as a practice of belonging.
> However there are problems the Marxist tradition never solved. You want a
> universal working class conscious of its own transformative agency; but you
> will not be able to describe this class in terms concrete enough to address
> any member of it in particular. No one can, those days are over, the
> language does not fit the times.
> When the *industrial* working class could still be conceived as a
> revolutionary subject, such a description was possible. Marx and Engels did
> it brilliantly, by spending years debating their ideas directly directly
> with the workers. But after the crisis of the 1930s, all capitalist states
> recognized the danger represented by the working class and made
> extraordinary efforts to integrate the industrial workers to capitalist
> practice, first through wage bargaining, then through benefits, then
> through a variety of cultural and even military appeals, culminating in the
> current situation where industrial workers are recruited to fascism with
> anti-immigrant nationalism and the vague promise of industrial jobs.
> This doesn't mean there is no transformative potential left in the
> industrial working classes. But they can't hold the place of a universal
> political subject,and the class you are looking for -  singular, concrete,
> conscious of itself and ready to act - is not solely defined by work
> anymore.
> In fact, the focus of the state on work and the workplace encouraged
> anyone who cared about class to look outside the factory and even the wage
> relation for the inequality and injustice of capitalist societies. Because
> those societies now focused as much on consumption - and more broadly, on
> what Marxists call "social reproduction" - as they did on production,
> direct oppression exerted by the capitalist state and by the forms of
> social reproduction that it mandated could be found in many different
> places. Identity politics emerged as a way of naming those sites of
> oppression, and even more importantly, as a way to gain transformative
> agency through the consciousness of belonging to an oppressed group.
> The upshot is, that if you wanted to redo Marx and Engels, you would have
> to start not by rereading their books and their tradition, but by taking
> new ideas of both oppression and transformation down to the places where
> identity politics is debated, and giving those new ideas a go.
> Now, this all does not mean everything is fine with identity politics as
> it is practiced today. Certainly just abandoning the question of work is
> the wrong path (but no one serious does it, so I don't know what the
> problem is?).  A new universal is definitely lacking, and much can be
> learned from the attempts to conceive a universal working class. However,
> it does mean that you can't just diss off identity in favor of some
> supposedly correct concept which you have totally dehistoricized,
> particularly by ignoring the dialectical negations to which it was subject.
> No one will take you seriously if you do. Today, pretty much every "return
> to Marx" is a return to some nostalgic and usually privileged self, alone
> even in the typically tiny groups, trying to convince themselves that their
> pure idea from the past can overcome everything that has happened in global
> society since 1968.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Marx to the trashcan." I'm just saying
> that if you do go to the barricades, you will not find a universal working
> class, and the language with which you seek to invoke or catalyze one, will
> remain empty and useless. Doing real politics is far more demanding than
> most of us can handle. The "back to class' posts in this thread are so
> vague, so nostalgic, so empty, that they do not come anywhere near the goal.
>
> What we are missing is a theory of social relations in the future. To be
> transformative it will have to be inclusive, combative and aspirational,
> attuned to a possible life beyond the dead-ends of the twentieth century.
>
> best, BH
> #  distributed via : no comme

Re: Paul Mason: Trump is a symptom of the new global disorder, not the cause

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Brian,

Thanks for your answer. I think you're right, speaking about capitalist
(self)destruction is useless, in the end, and even not philosophically
interesting. Also, I do not think one second that there are not people who,
at local levels, are involved in bio-regional fights.

In *L'Instant d'Après*, Bernard Aspe says that the problem with each
political fight is that it's always possible to justify it as such, as
complete in itself in a away, as truly necessary - but then the problem
becomes: how can we imagine the possibility to go beyond each political
fight in order to propose a planetary political project? We need a
planetary political project; how can we be the steward of Earth when Earth
does not belong to "us"? To think about stewardship before a
re-appropriation is maybe premature!

That being said, a bio-region is maybe the best possible point of
departure. And you think about the cosmic, and I really think like you,
that it's fundamental to articulate the place where we are with the
cosmos/cosmic (all my website Alienocene  is about
that, all my project about the re-interpretation of the Copernican
revolution, a re-interpretation that implies - yes! - to contest the
ecological geo-centrism...). The question is, for me, again: what is the
name of the interface between the bio-region and the cosmos, the territory
and the extra-territory? Are we not paying the price, politically, of our
difficulty to name this interface?

>From Kristin Ross's *Communal Luxury*, I understood something that has
NOTHING to do with accelerationism, I understood that the only way to get
rid of nationalism is not to immediately create an internationalism, that
will always be only an accumulation of nations, but to go, first, *below* the
level of nations (= Communes) AND simultaneously to imagine a level *beyond*
 the level of the nation. This level-beyond is the political interface that
we need to create if we want to avoid the hollow metaphysical discourse
about capitalism (yes, I need to stop feeding this discourse, I agree...)
and the islandization of each political fight.

Meanwhile, fascisms spread in the US, Italy, France, Poland, etc. We really
need to imagine a counter-force, at least a counter-narrative between the
territory and the cosmos if we want to stop it. But, to be honest with you,
I don't really see the beginning of the beginning of the shadow of the
possibility of something like that. Hence my extreme pessimism. Not a
pessimim about what people do or think, but about the fact that the Dark
Side of the Force seems to spread in every state. No?

In solidarity, my friend,

Frédéric


On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 8:01 PM, Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> Frederic,
>
> Thanks for caring about it.
>
> The political parties that could enable a dispersed transformation of the
> energy system, etc, do not yet exist, and the current reality is one of
> intense backlash against the slightest suggestion that we might not be
> living in the industrial-extractivist 1950s. This could yet become worse,
> it's obvious. But as you well know there are a growing number of people who
> want to move into institutional change, out of love, out of fear, out of a
> reasoned rejection of fascism and war and an unreasoned desire for
> everything that is beautiful about the way the living earth has evolved up
> to this point. These impulses are giving rise to social formations with
> agency. I see this very strongly in the Pacific Northwest where I am doing
> a project about bioregionalism. It is impressive how, for instance, a dozen
> major fossil fuel exporting terminals on the Columbia River have been
> stopped over the last six or seven years, including for example the Morrow
> Pacific terminal that would have exported more coal than the US now
> produces - and Wyoming's Powder River Basin would have just stepped up
> production, no problem. The next thing to be stopped is a giant methanol
> plant which would produce and export the key chemical for the making of
> plastic, a chemical derived from fracked natural gas, whose producers are
> seeking the Asian market (the plant itself is a Chinese project, but before
> cursing the Chinese I count the number of such plants the Americans and
> probably even the French have built around the world). You do not stop such
> things without large grassroots movements, but it also takes formal
> politics on every level to do it - especially munical governments, state
> governments and tribal sovereignties, with a key role for ecosystem
> advocates, aka lawyers, such as Columbia Riverkeeper from whom I'm learning
> so much about these things.
>
> Now, I realize that you are a philosopher and it is totally impotant to
> draw absolute distinctions, and also never to forget that capitalism is
> engaged in an accelerated process of destruction of the earth. However,
> most people can't bear such thoughts, and even me, I can't do it
> continuously, although I know it's impor

Re: Paul Mason: Trump is a symptom of the new global disorder, not the cause

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Brian,

As always your emails are illuminating.

I've one question: to you, what are the parties, social formations, social
forces that could enable "dispersed transformation of the energy and
agricultural systems accompanied but pervasive reworking of the patterns of
inhabitation and entirely new forms of ecological stewardship, based on the
logic of ecosystem services (which needs to be amplified by a new concept
of human services to ecosystems)"?

And maybe a secondary concern about the term "service" that you use: with a
configuration of other managerial terms, it has replaced -erased - first
"source," then "ressource," I mean it's a term completely integrated in the
system that produced the environmental disasters - I know I go quickly from
service to disaster, but, to make a long story short, it seems to me that
the word service is a denial of any eco-systemic reality (I try to explain
that in La Part inconstructible de la Terre, to be published in English as
The Unconstructable Earth at Fordham UP).

Best,

Frederic


On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 12:07 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:

> Mason really captures the intensity of the breakdown, not only of
> neoliberalism, but of the post-WWII interstate system. He also manages to
> keep Asia in the picture, which is essential, because it is the emergence
> of the China-centric economy that destabilized the former Trilateral
> hierarchy of the US, Western Europe and Japan. However I have always found
> Mason's prescriptions incoherent, and in this case he goes off into some
> fantasy about Keynes that is totally invisible on the actual political
> landscape. Except maybe in the UK itself? If that's true, as David
> suggests, it would explain what I don't get about the article. It would be
> really great to hear more detail about the Corbynites' analysis of the
> international situation and how they translate that into a domestic policy
> program (Barbrook, where are you?).
>
> In the US there is no broad discussion about the need for what Alex calls
> a "new pact," and the reason for this is that, quite unlike the situation
> in the 1930s, the economy is currently booming and there is (as yet) no
> credible threat of authoritarian control over the prosperous sectors. The
> professional-managerial types of the digital economy, yesterday's "new
> class," have firmly hitched their fortunes to the rising oligarchs, and
> there's far more interest in the sales of Elon Musk's flamethrower than in
> any transformation of the social order. We cannot currently produce
> anything on the order of Keynes, much less Marx, because the macro-level
> breakdown of the postwar system has really been caused at the micro level
> by the ethical-political decay of the science-based professions that Felix
> has analyzed. The emergence of the professionals as a force in their own
> right, based on education and therefore distinct from the
> capital-accumulating bourgeoisie, lent the consistency of a quest for
> objective truth to all the properly political discussions about how to
> organize a complex society. Neoliberalism dissolved that ethical component
> of technocratic society by encouraging professionals to abandon the state
> and any notion of public service, in favor of entrepreneurship with its
> self-interested disruption of legitimate rules and norms (something that
> Paolo Virno analyzed perfectly over 20 years ago in his text on
> Opportunism, Cynicism and Fear, which in English is tepidly called The
> Ambivalence of Disenchantment).
>
> Alex writes:
>
>  to stave off nationalism, racism, authoritarianism we need a new social
> pact (similar to fordism in its macro elements) that distributes the
> productivity of machine learning to all - a pact between the forces
> representing the female and multiethnic precariat and those of digital
> oligopoly
>
> Alex, I totally agree about the new pact but I think the reason it's not
> happening lies precisely in the description of its potential partners. The
> precariat as theorized in the 1990s and 2000s totally ignored the
> impoverished industrial workers outside major metropolitan areas and the
> agricultural sector, paying only lip service to migrant farm workers. It
> had nothing to say to the former artisanal and commercial middle classes
> whose "included" status was shattered by the opportunistic disruption of
> business models and the retreat of the state from anything to do with
> social reproduction. Unlike Fordism, it offered no productive pathway
> toward membership in any kind of social pact, but only dangled the promise
> of a redistribution of financial wealth whose spigot has now dried up. It
> is true that machine learning will unleash a new flood of industrial
> productivity comparable to that released by the cynical relocation of
> Fordist industry to Asia during the neoliberal period. But without any
> corresponding form of productive inclusion, that flood when it comes will
> only drown people in more meaning

Re: Best Collaborative Site(s)

[Frederic Neyrat]

No idea... Difficult to say without a clue... Could you let us know?

Frederic Neyrat

On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 9:13 AM, Anthony Stephenson 
wrote:

> What are/is the best collaborative writing sites?
>
> --
>
> - *Anthony Stephenson*
>
>
>
> *http://anthonystephenson.org/ <http://anthonystephenson.org/>*
>
>
>
>
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ZAD

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi,

Others links, infos, about the ZAD:
- twtitter, in French:
https://twitter.com/defendrehabiter

-This article:
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-de-mediapart/blog/060418/comme-la-zad-de-notre-dame-des-landes-defendons-dautres-manieres-d-habiter
followed, below, by its translation.



As with the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, we should defend other ways of
living





*January 17, 2018, the ultimate abandoning of a long hoped-for airport
project in the Notre-Dame-des-Landes region of France is a promising
victory for those supporting a new way of thinking in harmony with the
environment. As one of the longest recent struggles in France concerning
the environment and ecology, this substantial victory resonates as an
expression of hope for those continuing to fight in the name of ecology.
Nevertheless, the French government is still threatening to clear out and
dismantle the zone. It’s for this reason that a number of architects,
urbanists, thinkers, and citizens, have gathered together to write the
following statement in order to defend this unique experience of living the
future.*



The Victory Against the Construction of an Airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes
is based off a very large and diverse mobilization. Through the myriad of
diverse means of struggle that have contributed to the abandonment of this
airport project, the resistance by way of the permanent occupation of the
Zone to Defend (ZAD) has a primordial place. For over tens years now, by
continuing to allow for this territory to thrive, both the old and the new
inhabitants living there have helped to preserve and prevent the
destruction of both the natural lands as well as agricultural spaces. The
population has gone to great lengths to care for these spaces through
creating new forms of collective organization and the development of a
variety of activities: woodworking, bakeries, the collective cultivation of
vegetables and grains, professional forest clearing [bûcheronnage], the
creation of a library, orchards, a brewery, cheese production facility, a
cannery, an herbalist shop, musical gatherings, a tannery, a foundry, and a
silk printing shop… They have shown that another way of living was
possible, well beyond the state-form and standardized scenarios of
industrial agriculture, as much through other modes of construction as well
ways of imagining a viable and sustainable future for the rural and
agricultural territories.



*A Common Territory*



Throughout this wooded countryside, one could see the invention and weaving
together of a diversity of forms of life, all aspiring for a better harmony
and balance with the territory they occupied. Within the interactions
between the “historical” population, the farmers, the squatters, neighbors,
both wild animals and livestock, vegetation, insects and trees, but also
with everyone who passed through the region—friends, students, militants,
travellers, artisans— everyone together created a common territory, beyond
old notions of property, and other forms of belonging and typical routines
of living. This full-scale experiment undertaken over a long period of time
led each and every person to evolve in both their own representations as
well as their personal practices, far beyond the landscape of the
countryside. And for this very reason, the joyous horizon opened up by the
ZAD in spaces other than in the metropoles, is something that should matter
to each and every one of us.



*Another Way of Inhabiting and Building*



The ZAD is also the adventure of its construction. It can be seen in the
construction of a renovated farm, through a collective construction site,
through the new agricultural warehouses and barns created with fantastic
architectural designs; it can also be found in the poetic force of a
collection of cabins in the woods, it’s poetic force can found in the
middle of a lake, at the edge of a wilderness or in a vacant field; The
ZAD’s force can also be found in the presence of loosely constructed or
nomadic habitats, the campers, trucks, and yurts that complete the
inhabited landscape.

Outside of the norm, multiple, diverse, poetic, adapted, makeshift,
precarious, simple constructions— made out of local or reused materials—
out of earth, wood, straw, or through the recuperation of previously used
materials, these constructions respond, at their scale, to the ecological
stakes and energy crises at hand, in direct contrast to the world that the
industry of concrete and steel continues to construct throughout the entire
planet. The constructions of the ZAD are also the result of an inventive
architecture, one that is hands-on, DIY and very creative, a construction
process that is preferred through the collective stimulation of the ZAD
collective, pushing folks— both those accustomed to such work as well as
neophytes— to re-appropriate for themselves the activity of constructing
something for themselves. The multiplicity of forms constructed shows the
numerous possibilities fo

A blind alley?...

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi everybody,

An interesting photo about a certain form of electronic blindness, also
about power:



My best,

Frederic Neyrat
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Re: Quit Facebook: Open letter to Yann LeCun

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Olivier,

Really, people don't know what Facebook is? Holy cow!

Happy new year out of FB!  :)

Frederic Neyrat

2018-01-10 11:49 GMT-06:00 olivier auber :

> Open letter to Yann LeCun, former Professor at College de France, Head of
> Research in Artificial Intelligence at Facebook.
>
> From Olivier Auber, researcher, Free University of Brussels (VUB)
>
> Dear Yann
>
> as a researcher as you are too, but in another area, that is Natural
> Intelligence (NI), I would like to address you publicly to let you know
> that I'm leaving Facebook, probably definitely.
>
> The reason is simple. Facebook is obviously a powerful tool of
> communication. Many researchers I work with have become accustomed to using
> it without asking too much questions for their informal exchanges. The
> conversations that are conducted there are sometimes futile, but often also
> of the greatest interest.
>
> But I realize that these conversations, in a way, no longer belong to us
> when they are conducted on Facebook!
>
> The proof is that when you want to leave Facebook, the platform offers to
> bring with you a summary archive. But this archive does not contain:
>
> - links included in your personal posts (just that!)
> - discussions following your personal posts.
> - Comments left on other posts
> - the links of posts that you republish.
> - your address book (you get the names, not the mails or other coordinates
> theoretically shared with you)
>
> In short, it's a real hostage taking!
>
> In other words, Facebook looks like a sort of Far West saloon in which
> alcohol would be free. If you go in, not to drink, but to simply chat with
> your friends, you realize when you go out that your conversations and your
> address book no longer belong to you. They belong to the boss of the
> saloon! To top it off, the boss forbids you to say goodbye one by one to
> your friends and retrieve their details. Personal messages are indeed
> blocked after a few hundred!
>
> In short, by this open letter, I wish to alert my colleagues and more
> generally all professional or independent intellectual workers. Do not post
> your ideas on Facebook! Do not lead any interesting conversation on
> Facebook! Instead, choose to chat on free distributed social networks such
> as Diaspora or Mastodon. Choose shared intelligence platforms like
> Seenthis. In particular, my friends, independent researchers or independent
> artists, do not wait until Mark Zuckerberg, enriched to the extreme by your
> free work, wants to pay you a basic income. He has no legitimacy to do
> that! Instead, experiment with distributed free money creation networks
> such as Duniter.
>
> Dear Yann, to conclude, I do not doubt that thanks to your talent and that
> of the researchers you have gathered, Facebook can one day realize the most
> beautiful Artificial Intelligence. On this day, however, by behaving like
> this, Facebook is likely to be emptied of its users. Gone!
>
> Cheers
>
> Olivier Auber
>
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Re: Barcelona: nationalism, municipalism?

[Frederic Neyrat]

Hi,

I found this text interesting:
​"​
The future of the EU at stake in Catalonia
​"
http://www.atimes.com/article/future-eu-stake-catalonia/

Quote (amongst other interesting things):
​"​
The Catalan government beat the fascist goons with two very simple codes –
as revealed by La Vanguardia. “I’ve got the Tupperware. Where do we meet?”
was the code on a prepaid mobile phone for people to collect and protect
ballot boxes. “I’m the paper traveler” was the code to protect the actual
paper ballots. Julian Assange/WikiLeaks had warned about the world’s first
Internet war as deployed by Madrid to smash the electronic voting system.
The counterpunch was – literally – on paper. The US National Security
Agency must have learned a few lessons.​
​"
​
Best,

Frédéric Neyrat​

2017-10-03 14:40 GMT-07:00 Ian Alan Paul :

> The radical Left in Barcelona is conflicted. People oppose independence
> simply because it has the tendency to subsume all other political
> antagonisms (see the very strange left/right coalition currently in power
> in Catalonia). At the same time, there is general agreement about the right
> to self-determination which is historically very strong in the region, and
> Rajoy sending in his thugs to repress the referendum certainly has done
> nothing but bolster the sentiment. This of course is magnified by the
> well-remembered history of Francoist repression in the region.
>
> Rajoy's play is the divide the Spanish Left over the question of
> independence (particularly Podemos), while Catalan Independentists hope for
> intervention/sanctions from the EU/UN.
>
> The real history, of course, remains to be settled on the streets. The
> general strike which is currently unfolding can turn and reroute the
> present conjuncture in any which way, and no one, even Rajoy, seems to be
> sure where this is all headed. Let's be attentive and ready to act in
> solidarity with all of those on the streets when calls to do so inevitably
> arise.
>
> ~i
>
> _
>
> *“**What can I do?*
> *One must begin somewhere.*
> *Begin what?*
> *The only thing in the world worth beginning:*
>
> *The End of the world of course.”*
>
> *   -Aimé Césaire*
>
> On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 7:14 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
>
>> I think this is much more than identity politics, beyond the point that
>> all politics that aim at a certain broad, popular support, are also
>> about identity. That is, they need to address the questions of who are
>> "we" and what directions should "our" collective efforts should take.
>>
>> Several outcomes are possible. Catalan independence (irrespective of
>> whether this "nation" will also gets is own "state") could either point
>> beyond the nation state, helping to imagine the new Europe of Regions,
>> as Ulrike Guérot does not tired to advocate, or it could turn into just
>> another enclave protecting its supposedly homogeneous identity.
>>
>> There is always a danger of the latter outcome (which, to a certain
>> degree is what happened to Quebec nationalism in the 1990s), but it's
>> not preordained.
>>
>> What's the sense of nettimers in Barcelona? If this an opening, or a
>> closure?
>>
>> Felix
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2017-10-03 08:00, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> > Isn't this equivalent of identity politics, at the province level?
>> >
>> > Bunch of cute and original provinces, with unique histories, salamis,
>> > Gaudis and animosities, feeling so good being themselves, expressing
>> > their little unique patriotic feelings, and, while doing all that, being
>> > insignificant minions and subordinates, even bitches, of the powers that
>> > have no slightest intention of disintegrating into cute communes, and
>> > failing to join forces (or what's left of them) with other cute
>> > mistresses of the powers that be?
>> >
>> > Isn't it funny that the same entities that support identity politics
>> > support all these little independencies?
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>>
>> --
>>
>>  | http://felix.openflows.com
>>  |OPEN PGP:  https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC
>>
>>
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Re: Who said the US is boring?

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Brian,

Like you, I don't see any organization able to do this coup. But what seems
to me very important is to understand that, IF there is a strategy at stake
in Trump's politics, this is not a democratic one:

1/ First, is there a strategy at stake, and not only random tweets and
volte-faces? I think it's better to think that there is a strategy rather
than none or rather than just highlighting Trump's psychosis. Actually
there is no contradiction between these two features - strategy, and
psychosis or let's say primary narcissism à la Freud - but we should rather
think that there is - what, a political will, a political drive, an
inchoate strategy? Something like that;

2/ So let's call it the Strategy T.
Hypothetical, but theoretically useful;

3/ The important point for me is to affirm that Strategy T is not
democratic. The goal is to find a way to suspend democracy/civil
rights/freedom/next elections etc. Whatever the means. War, "terrorist"
attack, financial crisis, etc. We all know what the "shock doctrine" is;

4/ So of course the Strategy T does not aim to use white suprematists to
win any election, for that's not the goal. The goal is to create the
conditions thanks to which democracy could be suspended. Bannon recently
declared that they are "clowns" (sic):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/17/steve-bannon-calls-far-right-losers-trump-warns-china-trade-war-american-prospect
The problem is that clowns can be furiously dangerous - even and especially
when they don't exist (or feel like on the verge of vanishing from the
scene of History (in memoriam Hegel));

5/Then (I refer here to another email of Brian) "molecular" battles could
happen, micro civil wars and so on: all these events would be a perfect
reason to suspend the US democracy. Here again, the understanding of the
situation is located in the articulation between the molecular level (the
"Bruce Willis movies" as you say) and the institutional one (the sudden
legitimization of the Strategy T);

The only thing that could prevent that coup is the "crumbling" situation -
as you noticed - generated by Trump's "administration" of the country. In
fact, the man in the high castle cannot win against the people -
especially if the capitalists do not support him any longer because they
risk losing too much (money). Fascism without capitalism is not possible.

In this respect, there is one positive thing in the US situation: the
necessity to take side, to express what the important values/ideas are.
Thanks to that, maybe a sort of interesting political division could rise
up, a division that would really be political (and not racial, based on
resentment or liars, etc.). My drop of optimism.

Best,

FN



2017-08-16 12:14 GMT-07:00 Brian Holmes :

> Well, I have said so myself in the past. But it doesn't seem that way
> today. Right now you have the entire punditocracy and even the Prez hisself
> debating whether White Supremacy is to blame for the nation's ills.
> Monuments to the slaveholding Confederacy that were put up long after its
> demise are being taken down secretly in a single night, after agonized
> moral debate in the city councils, followed by raw fear that the Nazis
> might come to your town. As for the latter, they have declared a "Summer of
> Hate" in an uncanny rejoinder to some dazed celebrations 50 years ago. It
> all kind of momentarily overshadows the worry that the North Koreans might
> splash Guam with an improvised ICBM, or that a rash move by a would-be
> Commander-in-Chief might unleash a sea of fire on the peaceful city of
> Seoul.
>
> On one level, this is profoundly boring, as people across the planet will
> likely agree. Everyone is transfixed by a media system that promised a
> "Knowledge Society" but now focuses exclusively on a pathetic narcissist
> given to cathartic emotional outbursts. The major problems remain
> unaddressed, like what to do about a collapsing geopolitical system, or the
> coming wave of unemployment caused by AI, or above all, the currently
> unfurling mass extinction event and the explosive climate catastrophes
> spurred on by rising CO2 emissions. Beneath the 24-hour forth of the news,
> much of the regulatory apparatus built up by generations  of Americans to
> protect both the population and the environment from capitalist rapacity is
> being pragmatically stripped away. What's paid no attention today is
> defining tomorrow.
>
> On the other hand we in fact are debating White Supremacy, arguably the
> cultural bedrock on which imperial, extractive, consequence-denying
> capitalism has been built. With his declarations yesterday, Trump became
> the Defender-in-Chief of White Supremacy. The result is that his
> administration is crumbling, his closest advisors are speechless, the upper
> crust of the corporate sector is peeling away, and it's down to the hard
> core of the radical white nationalists and the most aggressive elements in
> the oil-and-gas industry, the military and

Re: Bifo: Democracy is not possible in Europe & Reply by Varoufakis

[Frederic Neyrat]

Moving and powerful text of Bifo, even though Yanis Varoufakis is right:

"renouncing Europe but not Italy, France, Greece, Germany, Britain etc.
only plays into the hands of those propagating the fantasy of returning
to the bosom of our benevolent nation-states"

the question is: how to refuse simultaneously the authoritarian Euroland
and any sort of nationalism? The only answer is: with a new form of
internationalism. On which basis? The fact that a human (I continue here
another nettime conversation) is always more than a mere human, that a
local place is fortunately more than itself, that a political fight
contains an "ideological" surplus that connects it to other places, etc. We
need a narrative able to give a face to this surplus, this "more than", and
we also - more than anything else - need a people of tellers able to
produce this Great Narrative.

Long life to the outernational to come!

Frédéric

2017-07-11 12:17 GMT+02:00 nettime's sinking ship :

> https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/yanis-
> varoufakis-franco-berardi/resignation-letter-from-
> franco-bifo-berardi-to-ya
>
> Dear friends and comrades of the Democracy in Europe Movement 25,
>
>  Dear friends and comrades of the Democracy in Europe Movement 25,
>
> After the shameful decisions of the Paris meeting of Minniti Collomb
> de Maziere it’s time to understand that there is something flawed in our
> project of re-establishing democracy in Europe: this possibility does
> not exist. Democratic Europe is an oxymoron, as Europe is the heart of
> financial dictatorship in the world. Peaceful Europe is an oxymoron, as
> Europe is the core of war, racism and aggressiveness. We have trusted
> that Europe could overcome its history of violence, but now it's time to
> acknowledge the truth: Europe is nothing but nationalism colonialism
> capitalism and fascism.
>
> During the Second World War not many protested against deportation,
> segregation, tortures and extermination of Jews, Roma, communist
> militants and homosexuals. People had no information about the
> extermination. Now we are daily acquainted about what is happening all
> around the Mediterranean basin, we know how deadly is the effect of the
> European neglect and of the refusal to take responsibility for the
> migration wave that is a direct result of the wars provoked by two
> centuries of colonialism.
>
> The Archipelago of infamy is spreading all around the Mediterranean
> Sea.
>
> Europeans are building concentration camps on their own territory,
> and they pay their Gauleiter of Turkey Libya Egypt and Israeli to do the
> dirty job on the coast of the Mediterranean sea where salted water has
> replaced ZyklonB.
>
> To stop the migratory Euro-Nazism is going to build enormous
> extermination camps. The non governmental organisation, guilty of
> rescuing people from the sea will be contained, downsized, criminalised,
> repressed.
>
> The externalisation of the European borders means extermination.
> Extermination is the word that defines the historical mission of Europe.
> Nazism is the only political form that corresponds to the soul of the
> European people.
>
> In the last twenty-five years (since when, in February 1991, a ship
> loaded with 26,000 Albanians entered the port of Brindisi) we have known
> that the great migration had began. Two paths were possible at that point.
>
> Opening its borders, starting a global distribution of resources,
> investing its wealth in a long lasting process of reception and
> integration of young people coming massively from the sea. This was the
> first path.
>
> The second was to reject, to dissuade, to make almost impossible the
> easy journey from Northern Africa to the coasts of Spain Italy and Greece.
>
> Europeans have chosen the second way, and they are daily drowning
> uncountable children and women and men.
>
> Auschwitz on the beach.
>
> With the exception of a minority of doctors, voluntary workers,
> activists and fishers who now are accused of being the abetters of
> illegal migrants, the majority of the European population are refusing
> to deal with their own historical responsibility.
>
> Therefore I declare that I’m not European anymore, and I declare
> that I have never been European.
>
> We have naively expected that the alliance of the British murderers
> the French killers the Italian stranglers the German slaughterers and
> the Spanish slayers could give birth to a democratic peaceful friendly
> union. This pretence is over, and I’m sick of it.
>
> Five centuries of colonialism, capitalism and nationalism have
> turned Europeans into the enemy of the human kind. May they be cursed
> forever.
>
> May Europeans be swept away by the storm they have generated, by the
> weapons they are building, by the fire they have ignited, by the hatred
> they have cultivated.
>
> Because of the aforementioned reasons I must renounce to the honour
> of 

nationalism, outernationalism

[Frederic Neyrat]

Just read on CNN:
​"Trump says he's 'absolutely destroying' regulations
"

Is nationalism anti-global? No, nationalism is globally destructive, for
instance the fact to refuse environmental regulations is globally
destructive, unless for people who believe that nationalism produces
impermeable frontiers able to stop climate change.

How can people forget so deeply the lessons of History? Forget what
happened during WW1 and WW2? If we can't fight against this blindness, we
are fucked.

We really need to avoid this double trap: neoliberal globalism, and
nationalism. That's why I speak about an outernationalism. If it's a
fiction, it's the fiction we need, right now.
​
​In solidarity,

Frederic N.​
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Re: [spectre] Lex CEU

[Frederic Neyrat]

nationalism is a good thing? I certainly misunderstood your email, sorry,
as nationalism leads to wars and global destruction, cf. WW1, WW2 - and WW3?

what we need is, as north-american poet Gizzi says, an outernationalism

best,

frederic n.

2017-04-04 8:16 GMT-05:00 heath bunting :

> dear janos
>
> long time no see
>
> it appears to me that like many other countries, hungary is disengaging
> from imperial vassal statehood and returning to nationalism
>
> this is potentially a good thing, as the rule of international law is
> incompatible with imperialism and nationalism at least has the option to
> be compatible with international law


<>



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Re: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Excellent text, thanks for that. Just one comment about point 2: Trump
   is consistent alas, it's just that we refused to think, for a while,
   that the worst was certain. It's true that it sounds unreal, this
   unraveling of history - are we back to the fifties, to the thirties? -
   and Alex Foti is right, it's a reactionary turn (not a conservative
   one) and an exit from what we used to call neoliberalism. So, I'd say
   that our task is to be consistent and to not only act "multiply and
   chaotically" (even though I like multiplicity and choasmose).

   My best,

   Frederic Neyrat

   2017-01-24 12:04 GMT-06:00 Ian Alan Paul <[1]ianalanp...@gmail.com>:

10 Preliminary Theses on Trump
Ian Alan Paul, January 2017
1. Trump's power is fundamentally virtual in form.
 <...>

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Re: What is the meaning of Trump's Victory + Badiou

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Thanks Molly!

   Eco's list is very interesting. It might be useful to adapt it to our
   situation. Alex Foti's expression, "national populism," seems also
   accurate, especially if we define this nationalism as an immunitary
   nationalism (even though nationalism is maybe in itself immunitary). We
   could speak about an immunitary populism that would imply, as one of
   its necessary conditions, an exacerbated racism; one of the functions
   of this racism would be to mask the current transformation of
   neo-liberalism. By the way, I'm not sure at all that Trump's politics
   will be anti neoliberal: US' protectionism has always been a way to
   prepare, launch, spread, and maintain the neo-liberal agenda.

   Best,
   Frederic

   2016-11-23 16:48 GMT-06:00 Molly Hankwitz :

   14 features defining fascism from Umberto Eco:

   
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html

   On Nov 22, 2016, at 6:56 AM, Frederic Neyrat  wrote:

 Hi Steven,
 Concerning fascism - is Trump fascist? - cf. this talk of Badiou,
 "Reflexion on the recent election": 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRnUpVLc31w
 in which he speaks about a "democratic fascism."�
 Maybe it's not the best way to define the current situation but, again,
 my question is less "who" is D Trump � bu âtâ what he does
 â, with whom he is going to work and so on. Concerning the military
 aspect of his politicsâ, let's bet that he will not stop the
 over-militarization of the country. And the over-militarization of a
 society, especially when it targets a specific kind of population
 (black people, natives), is a perfect tool to set the ultra-liberal
 agenda up - an agenda that you described very well.
 
<...>


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Re: What is the meaning of Trump's Victory + Badiou

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Hi Steven,

   Concerning fascism - is Trump fascist? - cf. this talk of Badiou,
   "Reflexion on the recent election": 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRnUpVLc31w
   in which he speaks about a "democratic fascism."�

   Maybe it's not the best way to define the current situation but, again,
   my question is less "who" is D Trump � bu �t� what he does
   �, with whom he is going to work and so on. Concerning the military
   aspect of his politics�, let's bet that he will not stop the
   over-militarization of the country. And the over-militarization of a
   society, especially when it targets a specific kind of population
   (black people, natives), is a perfect tool to set the ultra-liberal
   agenda up - an agenda that you described very well.

   �Best,

   Frederic�

   2016-11-21 15:19 GMT-06:00 Kurtz, Steven :

 I tried to resist this thread, but ultimately cannot. Just a few points.
 Are the republicans voters racist? I think the vast majority are not
 (although that still leaves millions that are). What most republican
 voters are is indifferent to racism. If taxes get cut, and it comes with
 a dash of racism--OK. If regulations on business will be lifted, and it
 comes with a dash of racism--OK. If guns can be owned and existing
 regulations are loosened, and it comes with a dash of racism--OK. If
 small business will get a break, and it comes with a dash of racism--OK.
 There are many reasons right leaning people are voting as they are.
 <...>

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Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory? Platonism

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Hi Angela,

   Just one thought: you wrote that

   "� I� leave that to� Platonists. I do think that every person who voted
   for Trump is a racist �" etc.�

   But Platonism (I mean the way you interpret Platon) precisely implies
   to say� X "is" Y! It's precisely a way to define someone by his or her
   being/essence! And so the problem is that it's a dead end, because the
   same persons who have voted for Obama and who now have voted for Trump,
   were they racist or not racist? Did they become racist? And if they
   vote for a quasi-Clinton next time, would it mean that they will not be
   racist anylonger?�

   �Instead of essentializing people, I think it might be more productive
   to speak about: the racism of X or the racism implied by this action or
   - and then I absolutely agree with what you said - the fact that this
   action is racist because of its effects and because for some people�
   "it was not a deal-breaker" to vote for Trump.

   �I think that to pass from a subject to her or his acts open the
   possibility for a change. The goal is not to escape responsibility, but
   to create a distance between a subject and his or her acts in order to
   open the possibility for another kind of acts - acts that will be
   anti-racist.

   My best,

   Frederic�

   2016-11-18 3:28 GMT-06:00 Angela Mitropoulos :

 Felix,

 >And to argue that all forms of social solidarity that existed in
 >the post-war period (such as the welfare state, unions, community
 >churches and so on) where simple white solidarity seems also overly
 >broad.

 Polanyi's understanding of social solidarity stretches much, much
 further back than the mid-20th c, post-war period, all the way to
 some pre-capitalist paradise that never existed.
 <...>

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Re: What is the meaning of Trump's victory?

[Frederic Neyrat]

Dear Angela Mitropoulos,

Thanks for your email and your text, that I just read. I have a question
and I hope I will be able to formulate it correctly: do you think that
there is a connection - or not - between
neo-liberalism/capitalism/democracy of economy (I don't know the name you
use/prefer) and racism?

 Here is my thought: as I don't think that racism is just a natural
passion/affect/drive, I try to understand where it comes from. And, as I
try to understand what happened in the USA, I thought that the
neoliberal/capitalist/economic destruction of the economic, cultural,
symbolic conditions of a certain number of white people, who however voted
for Obama during the two last elections (at least some of them), fueled,
generated or regenerated racism and a reactionary moment: to restore
(or/and produce) a patriarchal/racist/misogynistic situation. If I'm a
right, and maybe I'm not, then I see two problematic blind spots:
1/ the first one would be to only focus on "neoliberalism" in being blind
to racism and the reactionary attempt to restore white suprematism (I think
that this attempt will fail, necessarily and fortunetely, but for sure
before it fails some disasters will occur), and I think that your article
help us to avoid this position;

2/ the second one would be to disconnect racism from a certain number of
economic conditions and to avoid naming - whatever the name - the economic
structure that reawakens or creates the worst. Is there not something
racist, from the beginning, in capitalism?

Please, let me know your thoughts,

In solidarity,

Frederic Neyrat



2016-11-10 23:55 GMT-06:00 Angela Mitropoulos :

> Brian, re this:
>
> The great achievement of the US Democratic Party since 1968, which I
> don't mean to deny in any way, is to to have made all those groups
> formerly called "minorities" into crucial components of a voting bloc.
> That's a starting point. Now let's ditch the financial elites that
> currently control the Democratic Party, and replace them with at least
> a part of the working class, or the so-called "majority" (which is
> another desperate minorty in its own right, like all of us).

<>


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Re: Live Your Models

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Hi Florian,
   Thanks a lot for your explanations!
   All my best,
   Frederic

   2016-05-04 17:20 GMT-05:00 Florian Cramer <[1]flrnc...@gmail.com>:

   Hello Frederic,

   1/ on the one hand, you show very well that "there is hardly a system
   that is more dependent on� efficiency-optimized global supply chains,
   high investments into manufacturing capacities, economics of scale and,
   well, the neoliberal economic system as computer electronics," you
   criticize the "naive automation" of the three last decades, you insist
   on the fact that our electronics society leans on "rare" metals;
   2/ but you also argue that "a modern big� furniture factory is
   significantly more environmentally and� resource-friendly than a
   FabLab; and of course, a modern data center� centrally hosting several
   thousand or million websites is� environmentally more friendly than
   thousand or million micro servers in� individual homes," siding with
   accelerationists who - like "post-environmentalists,"
   "eco-pragmatists," etc. - reject so called "Folk politics."
 <...>

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Accelerationism, Prometheanism, and Posthumans

[Frederic Neyrat]

   Excerpts from the Accelerationist Manifesto:

   "We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over
   society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global
   problems or achieving victory over capital."

   "We believe it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed
   many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the
   neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond
   the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms."

   So, what is the difference between that and an electronic-based system
   that denies its material ties?

   
(http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/)

   Best,

   Frederic Neyrat


   2016-05-04 16:07 GMT-05:00 Frederic Neyrat :

   Dear Florian (and thanks Brian for your post),

   There is something I try to understand in you post:

   1/ on the one hand, you show very well that "there is hardly a system
   that is more dependent on� efficiency-optimized global supply chains,
   high investments into manufacturing capacities, economics of scale and,
   well, the neoliberal economic system as computer electronics," you
   criticize the "naive automation" of the three last decades, you insist
   on the fact that our electronics society leans on "rare" metals;
   2/ but you also argue that "a modern big� furniture factory is
   significantly more environmentally and� resource-friendly than a
   FabLab; and of course, a modern data center� centrally hosting several
   thousand or million websites is� environmentally more friendly than
   thousand or million micro servers in� individual homes," siding with
   accelerationists who - like "post-environmentalists,"
   "eco-pragmatists," etc. - reject so called "Folk politics."
 <...>

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"Everyday I am Çapuling." - A symbol video of Taksim event

[frederic neyrat]

a video about Turkey event

FN

-- Forwarded message --
From: Volkan Çelebi 
Date: 2013/6/5
Subject: "Everyday I am Çapuling." - A symbol video of Taksim event
To: Volkan Celebi 


http://videogaleri.gazetevatan.com/21008_9_Everyday-Im-Capuling.html

Turkish word "Çapulcu" which President Tayyip Erdoğan used for
peaceful protesters:
It means  "looter”, “marauder".

In the phrase, it means "Everyday I am becoming a looter, a marauder."




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Please Announce and Circulate This Campaign - regarding Istanbul Taksim Movement

[frederic neyrat]

"Like many people, I've been following the news re: #occupyGezi, but I
still feel I don't really understand what's happening there. It would
be great if someone could provide an first-hand, on-the-ground report
rather than just some second-hand theory based on media accounts.

Any nettimers in Istambul these days?

Felix"


Here it is:

Best,

Frederic Neyrat

-- Forwarded message --
From: Volkan Çelebi 
Date: 2013/6/5
Subject: Please Announce and Circulate This Campaign - regarding
Istanbul Taksim Movement
To:


Français:
https://www.change.org/fr/p%C3%A9titions/monokl-polis-%C5%9Fiddetine-son-verilsin-contre-la-violence-policiere-a-istanbul
Türkçe:
https://www.change.org/tr/kampanyalar/monokl-polis-%C5%9Fiddetine-son-verilsin-contre-la-violence-policiere-a-istanbul?utm_campaign=twitter_link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

English:

https://www.change.org/petitions/monokl-polis-%C5%9Fiddetine-son-verilsin-contre-la-violence-policiere-a-istanbul
Deutsch:

https://www.change.org/de/Petitionen/monokl-polis-%C5%9Fiddetine-son-verilsin-contre-la-violence-policiere-a-istanbul?utm_campaign=twitter_link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

Web site and supporter philosophers:
http://monokurgusuzlabirent.blogspot.com/




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Re: Driverless cars, pilotless planes -- will there be jobs left for a human beings / intellectuality

[frederic neyrat]

Dear Brian,

I was thinking about your expression, "constituent forces": they
already exist, they already work, they already produce, and they can
do that until the "end". So, for me, the real problem is not only to
know where is the constituent power, the center of the value, etc, not
only the battle around the production of the value, but also: how to
pass from immanent constitution to political change. The failure of
the whole thought linked with post-operaism is the belief in the fact
that political change will automatically (sic) follow the power of the
general intellect. It failed. Last political Springs were not
ecological; nobody cares about ecology anylonger; climate change is
going one; the Russians left their basis in North Pole last week,
kindof The Day Before Tomorrow. When everything is immanent,
everything follows the way be which things are produced. I do not call
for a Transcendence, but for this minimum amount of separation without
which we will continue to constitute and produce the same way. That is
to say: we have to rethink intellectuality as something neither
immanent (Virno) nor transcendent (say Sartre).

Best,

Frederic

2013/5/26 Brian Holmes :

> On 05/24/2013 04:50 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote:
>
>> Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that
>> the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from
>> China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing
>> ...  a world of what Summers calls automated "doers".
>> They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
>> The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the
>> "doers", creating a bifurcation of the labour market that is already
>> discernible.
>
> Summers is just as dead wrong as Will Hutton, the author of this article.
> Summers assumes that production is the only job that counts, therefore,
> automation can only produce massive unemployment. Meanwhile Hutton, with the
> utopian visions of his conclusion, assumes that heightened production will
> free people for human development: care for the ageing, the solution of
> ecological problems, the explosion of creative professions. Neither will
> admit that the maintenance of a social order requires a very large number of
> professional educators, ideologists artists and thinkers. That is exactly
> the case of society today, whose predatory form of financial capitalism is
> maintained and developed by an oversized management sector, including
> politicians and technocrats alongside bankers, CEOs, strategists,
> advertisers, designers, human-resource psychologists, union bosses,
> entertainers, etc. We live under the grip of *that* professional universe,
> whose expansion and accumulation of power has marked the entire neoliberal
> era. If there is no counter-project, their power will only grow in the
> course of this crisis.
 <...>


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Re: Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

[frederic neyrat]

Hi,

I agree with many ideas of this inspiring text, despite certain questions:

1/ I'm not sure that the word "nazism" is able to make us understand very
well the market logics... ok, it's an image, but some images are more able
to install a screen of clichés than an access to reality;

2/ I wonder if OWS is not quite the contrary of this text: the problem is
not to make vanish the political "pupetts" but to embody them into a one per
cent, into a One against 99. To give market bodies (as an Army of Hatred? Or
an Army of Insensitivity? Human Drones of the Capital?...) in order to fight
against the ideological representation of
it-is-the-fault-of-the-machines-and-sorry-we-can't-help-it-just-put-another-coin-please;

3/ I love Sci-Fi and his power to turn concepts into perceptions, but I feel
unwell to read that especially when the Real appears...

All my best,

Frederic Neyrat



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Fwd: [multitudes_colred] Place de la Puerta del Sol, Espagne

[frederic neyrat]

-- Message transf?r? --
De : Raul 
Date : 19 mai 2011 18:45
Objet : Re: [multitudes_colred] Place de la Puerta del Sol, Espagne
? : multitudes_colred 


 Un article sur le mouvement ?crit par des copains de l'Universidad N?mada.

Ra?l

*On 15thMay 2011, around 150,000 people took to the streets in 60 Spanish
towns and cities to demand ?Real Democracy Now?, marching under the slogan
?We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and politicians?. The
protest was organised through web-based social networks without the
involvement of any major unions or political parties. At the end of the
march some people decided to stay the night at the Plaza del Sol in Madrid.
They were forcefully evacuated by the police in the early hours of the
morning. This, in turn, generated a mass call for everyone to occupy his or
her local squares that thousands all over Spain took up. As we write, 65
public squares are being occupied, with support protests taking place in
Spanish Embassies from Buenos Aires to Vienna and, indeed, London. You
probably have not have read about it in the British press, but it is
certainly happening. Try *#spanishrevolution*, #*yeswecamp,#nonosvamos*or #*
acampadasol*on Twitter and see for yourself. What follows is a text by
Emmanuel Rodr?guez and Tom?s Herreros from the Spanish collective*Universidad
N?mada.

*IT?S THE REAL DEMOCRACY, STUPID*


*15**TH**May, from Outrage to Hope*



There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 2011 has come to mark a turning point:
from the web to the street, from conversations around the kitchen table to
mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from outrage to hope. Tens
of thousands of people, ordinary citizens responding to a call that started
and spread on the internet, have taken the streets with a clear and
promising demand: they want a real democracy, a democracy no longer tailored
to the greed of the few, but to the needs of the people. They have been
unequivocal in their denunciation of a political class that, since the
beginning of the crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and
obeying the dictates of the euphemistically called ?markets?.

We will have to watch over the next weeks and months to see how this demand
for *real democracy now*takes shape and develops. But everything seems to
point to a movement that will grow even stronger. The clearest sign of its
future strength comes from the taking over of public squares and the
impromptu camping sites that have appeared in pretty much every major
Spanish town and city. Today??four days after the first march??social
networks are bursting with support for the movement, a virtual support that
is bolstered by its resonance in the streets and squares. While forecasting
where this will take us is still too difficult, it is already possible to
advance some questions thatthis movementhas put on the table.


Firstly, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15thMay Movement are
spot on. A growing sector of the population is outraged by parliamentary
politics as we have come to known them, as our political parties are
implementing it today??by making the weakest sectors of society pay for the
crisis. In the last few years we have witnessed with a growing sense of
disbelief how the big banks received millions in bail-outs, while cuts in
social provision, brutal assaults on basic rights and covert privatisations
ate away at an already skeletal Spanish welfare state. Today, none doubts
that these politics are a danger to our present and our immediate future.
This outrage is made even more explicit when it is confronted by the
cowardice of politicians, unable to put an end to the rule of the financial
world. Where did all those promises to give capitalism a human face made in
the wake of the sub-prime crisis go? What happened to the idea of abolishing
tax havens? What became of the proclamation that the financial system would
be brought under control? What of the plans to tax speculative gains and the
promise to stop tax benefits for the highest earners?


Secondly, the 15thMay Movement is a lot more than a warning to the so-called
Left. It is possible (in fact it is quite probable) that on 22ndMay, when
local and regional elections take place in Spain, the left will suffer a
catastrophic defeat. If that were the case, it would be only be a preamble
to what would happen in the general elections. What can be said today
without hesitation is that the institutional left (parties and major unions)
is the target of a generalised political disaffection due to its sheer
inability come up with novel solutions to this crisis. This is where the
two-fold explanation of its predicted electoral defeat lies. On the one
hand, its policies are unable to step outside a completely tendentious way
of reading the crisis that, to this day, accepts that the problem lies in
the scarcity of our resources. Let?s say it loud and clear: no such a
problem exists, there is no lack of resources, the real problem i