nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments) P.S.
Hello Brian, Just a few comments: By postmodern delirium I was referring to that moment when people seemed to abandon history and succumbed to ???capitalism's ability to deliver the goods??? and Reagan and Thatcher were the shining stars starring down the Soviet bear and celebrating neoliberalism???s ascendent status - a wave of privatisation - and the dismemberment of the welfare state (with the various means appropriate to either the UK or the US). To paraphrase Lyotard: the grand narratives of modernism and the Enlightenment were losing traction. The welfare state became a corporate hobby horse with defense and finance leading the pack. Of course the tech companies were in the mix also but that???s another story. So, the crisis you so aptly brought up is actually a series of crises; repetitive global traumas relating to war, climate change, finance etc??? And, contrary to D. Garcia???s trashing of Mr. Zizek, also a crisis in relation to the Liberal (as in the Enlightenment sense) values so highly cherished by Western democracies (whose democratic values are constantly Blowing in the Wind). By an easy reckoning, America???s Liberal values are in a bit of disarray with the police running amok and the country in constant war and anything resembling social democratic values under attack by institutions as vile as any of Europe???s neo-fascist parties. Meanwhile, the financial brains of The City and Wall Street are having a great time pilfering and thieving. And, Cameron is begging Obama for the green light on the totalisation of the surveillance state. Whoppee for Liberalism and plurality??? Plurality only exists for the 1% (when you measure the results) the rest feed on the crumbs that ???ruling classes??? call freedom of speech. I???m not knocking democracy at all but we need to look at things a lot more realistically instead of paying homage to illusions. By that I mean, as you highlighted, places like Spain or Greece, where people are dealing with issues relating to political power and the insidiousness of the neoliberal state. best, always allan (BTW Bordoni and Bauman???s State of Crisis is worth alike) # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
2015-01-14 8:07 GMT+00:00 Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com: Hello, Brian. On an opposite end of the spectrum, I encourage you to read the interview with Luz, the cartoonist of Charlie Hebdo, which Patrice Riemens sent to this list. Some of the things this man says are just astonishing to me. He claims that the group of caricaturists at Charlie did not want to deal with grand symbolic figures but with very specific things, images that make sense and are funny in France. But on what planet does this guy live? How can he see caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as anything else but a symbol, a charged cliche, a hot-button item, a waving red cloak in a vast international bull ring? I am sorry to criticize someone whose loss has been so great, but it's pure narcissism, this idea of a cherished France that could be held in your hand and protected from the world into which it nonetheless sends its armies and its oil majors. The sacrosanct caricature of Charlie, brandished in the air as a fetish of liberty, is exactly the reification of the self that O'Connor describes. I don't know what will come of these events, and I don't want to prejudge what French society will make of them, but I can see the potential for the very facile patriotic and chauvinist defence of a supposedly secular freedom of expression which would justify the complete absence of any reflection on the griefs that push people to the insanity of terrorism. I have seen this worst case happen in the US, with the results that we have before our eyes. What we need is not just reflection but action to change the way that the world economy functions. Otherwise its necropolitical character will inevitably poison whatever fine lands we imagine ourselves to live in. Personally, I think this kind of reasoning can lead to very dangerous dead-ends. Do you just need to speak of colonialism to take away all individual responsabilities of human beings in their actions towards others? In the politically correct/postmodern left, it just seems so. Moreover. it seems that this feeling of collective guilt automatically legitimizes any curtailment of freedom of speech... You can't say or express what you think because of your government's actions doesn't seem like my kind of politics... This seems to be the same think that Zizek tried to say in an article for New Statesman:Â Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the cheap relativisation of the crime (the mantra of who are we in the West, perpetrators of terrible massacres in the Third World, to condemn such acts). It has even less to do with the pathological fear of many Western liberal Leftists to be guilty of Islamophobia. For these false Leftists, any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia; Salman Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, etc. The result of such stance is what one can expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be . . . http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacre-are-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity Best regards from Portugal -- Miguel Caetano http://twitter.com/remixtures http://iscte-iul.academia.edu/MiguelCaetano/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
On 01/13/2015 03:58 PM, allan siegel wrote: Yes, there is a crisis, that shouldn�t be a big surprise but what precisely is the crisis?A number of contemporary philosophers have been wading into this question for some time now; is it the crisis that marks a break with modernity? Quite possibly. Is it simply the economic crisis of 2008? No. After floating through years of fuelled by the illusions of the post-modern delirium we�'re finding that it is not easy to get very far if you�'re running on empty and the consequence finding ourselves stuck in something akin to an ideological vacuum. Hello Allan. In few words you say so much. The post-modern delirium you refer to is, by my reckoning, the product of the last half century. It condenses the various ways that capitalist societies found to bring back into their fold all those who revolted against them starting some five decades ago. Post-modern delirium is the attempted reification of a failed revolt. When the lingering dreams and feverish regrets are burnt away, what remains is the measured, objectified, manipulated, controllable residue of past generations' struggles for emancipation and justice. For anyone who might care about these things, there is a very penetrating author named James O'Connor who wrote books such as The Fiscal Crisis of the State, followed by Accumulation Crisis and then by The Meaning of Crisis. Three books that address your question. Generally people only read the first one, published in 1973, because they want to know why the Fordist boom fell apart. The idea that slowly emerges from his later work, however, is that in capitalist societies, personality crisis can be understood as the momentary breakdown of a social process that has led individuals to treat their own selves as objects: glittering, pricey, high-status things whose possession and ownership gives us power over others. A crisis of value (that is, not only a plunge in the cash value of asssets, but also a failure of the institutional circuit that sustains cash value) can therefore be a vital threat to psychic health and equilibrium. At the moment of the vaccuum - ie the empty bank account, the lost job or the failed business - your thing, your self, suddenly begins to appear worthless. By the same token, though, crisis can also be a chance to exit the strictly privatized coccoon of the reified self, and begin understanding and acting upon human interdependence. If one cannot simply buy and flaunt the simulacra of fulfillment, then some attention to the reciprocities whereby people sustain each other becomes not only a necessity, but even a new reason for living. Check out how O'Connor describes the conjoined process of social and psychic crisis, almost thirty years ago in The Meaning of Crisis: We know that capital is racing madly through the present; it has raced headlong into a crisis. It attempts to reduce its turnover time compulsively and obsessively. Modernization of production, internationalization of production and a bloated debt structure are three sides of a single process. Whole cities and communities are thrown away in the race to defend and expand profits. Growth coalitions multiply like cancer cells, killing the normal cells of family, religion, tradition. The frenzy of accumulation; the fear that it will come to an end in a huge crash or an environmental or military catastrophe; the unbelievable excesses of late capitalism worldwide - these bear witness to the obsessive-compulsive qualitity of the inner soul of capital. If we could become its inner eye, if we could transport ourselves into its inner soul, if we could hear the relentless beat of accumulation, we could experience as well as know the madness of this obsessiveness – this world where capital and money are a religious and aesthetic experience, and where power is a moral category. When we examine ourselves, we find capital within our own souls. We too rush through the present; we race for some victory – or toward some unknown destination; we are governed by unlimited desire; we stumble and fall from identity into the abyss. We create our own personal crisis, as capital creates its own crisis. For me, that's an amazing paragraph: it's an economist putting the intimate self into the macro-economic picture. Whenever this kind of move is made, ethics and then politics surges to the fore. Amidst the general wreck and sadness of what happens in the world, the cultural question is not just how one suffers but rather how one struggles to create one's own crisis - and then hopefully to resolve it, in a social space beyond the fiction of a stable and valuable interiority which one could polish and improve and flaunt before the desiring gaze of others. In fact what is being called the ‘crisis�' is probably the result of the conflation of a host of historical factors: political, economic, etc… So, to view the crisis in the absence of
Re: nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
On 14/01/15 10:58, allan siegel wrote: Hello, [...] Were the banks and their bosses ever held accountable? Some were, at least in Iceland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9311_Icelandic_financial_crisis#Criminal_investigations Chris ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)
Hello, Yes, there is a crisis, that shouldn’t be a big surprise but what precisely is the crisis? A number of contemporary philosophers have been wading into this question for some time now; is it the crisis that marks a break with modernity? Quite possibly. Is it simply the economic crisis of 2008? No. After floating through years of fuelled by the illusions of the post-modern delirium we’re finding that it is not easy to get very far if you’re running on empty and the consequence finding ourselves stuck in something akin to an ideological vacuum. In fact what is being called the ‘crisis’ is probably the result of the conflation of a host of historical factors: political, economic, etc… So, to view the crisis in the absence of any substantial historical context is simply misleading. It is as if we can view the recent events in Paris detached from the legacy of French colonialism and the post-colonial turbulence that has continued to batter Algeria. We live in a global world still very much being buffeted by the decades of colonial and imperial hubris that has plundered the third world in any number of political guises. The horrendous blow-back from this is used to buttress the surveillance states now common in the West: high tech snooping tools, random police operations which provide citizens with a fragile, fleeting sense of security that is regularly shattered by unexpected violence and killings. Countless innocents are slaughtered without warning; police forces run amok… It is yet to be seen whether the political movements in Spain or Greece can move their societies in a new direction beyond the neoliberal economic pincers - I certainly hope they can - but the fact that these movements exist is a testament to some tangible threads of historical continuity and a capacity to create new forms of political organisation. The fact is that in the belly of the beast the banks escaped like bandits with a free ticket to manage the next financial crisis while effortlessly plundering the U.S. treasury and there were no political entity/s or coalition of forces that could deter the neoliberal juggernaut. Were the banks and their bosses ever held accountable? A sad reflection on the manner in which the neoliberal mind-set has distorted not only the political consciousness of the citizenry but trashed the most basic forms of common sense. I’m not being cynical, really, just realistic; we cannot demand the impossible but we can manage to to insure that the next generation has the tools and the wisdom, to go beyond the ineptness, the corruption, and the greed the has polluted so many hard won democratic institutions and whittled away the parameters of a just society. Unless all the solid, meaningful efforts (in any number of disciplines, economic programmes or alternative and innovative practices) can coalesce into a political force able to out-manouver the status quo of the current political landscape we’re in for more stormy weather. allan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
