Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
Felix Stalder wrote.. > > Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of > Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media > left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view. > > First, while the intuition about the necessity to interrupt the normal > flows of communication was correct and has proofed to be very powerful > since, there was no idea what do in the space that would thus be opened > up. We could have used the time when the system was relatively stable to > think about this, but we didn't. Now, the the system is falling apart, > the far right is capable of imposing an even darker version of disaster > capitalism. > There has been very little interest in offering points of translation, > that is, to think about how people who are not in the same circuit could > appropriate and transform for their own use, the insights they find in > the theoretical perspective one offers. I am trying to get a sense of what is really at stake in these discussions.. what the underlying continuities as well as big changes that make these questions of counter-cultures and the new autonomous zones of message boards and meme wars seem important rather than a trivial side show. The big change from the 1990s is the way internet and digital cultures (in large areas of the world) are now fully inserted into and thus inseparable from daily life. The full impact of the web 2.0 revolution and the rise of the platform era is quite simply the -mainstreaming- of digital cultures. In this context it is nonsense to see work on the political, cultural and epistemic impact of these changes as a marginal obsession of -a self-selecting group geeks.. the continued development of earlier agendas of the cypher punks around anonymity, surveillance, autonomy, and agency as a necessity for creating wider progressive change has increased not decreased in urgency. Digital cultures have become quite simply a -Total Social Fact- [Noortje Maares-Digital Sociology]. This -insertiability- of the digital cultures into all aspects of life is the foundation for both the success of these platforms and devices as well as the basis of monopolistically inclined business models that Nick Srnicek has called platform capitalism in active combination with the surveillance state. Coming to grips with this problem is more subtle than it is sometimes portrayed. The tricky point lies in understanding that what constitutes actual participation and what differentiates these cultures from all that preceded it. Participation is not as it is sometimes portrayed -the difference between -the passive audience and the active engaged participants or users-. No, a traditional audience (or public) can be as active and highly engaged as anyone else. The key point of difference is that engagement in the case of an -audience- is invisible. The engagement of an audience is invisible because it is not -traceable-. And without traceability there can be no -feedback-. No feedback means no participation. This was de Certeau’s observation long ago and why he saw consumption as invisible co-creation with an asymmetric balance of power. And observed the presence of silent invisible networks of resistance that he called tactical. It is this necessary traceability on which participation depends that has been opportunistically seized upon as the business models and the new forms of exploitation and value extraction we know as platform capitalism which when combined with state surveillance squats like a toad atop of what could still become a post capitalist culture of contribution. The -insertion- of this model of digital cultures into the everyday life accounts for both its success and also sub-cultural resistance that demands the right to anonymity and the need for unregulated spaces. It is the need for these spaces that accounts for the huge popularity of message bodes like 4chan where registration is not required and anonymity is an expedient that morphed into an ethos and then into a movement whose potential has only begun. Back in 2012 Gabriella Coleman wrote a journal article reflecting on the research she had been doing since 2008 on the formative role of 4chan's random page in the emergence of Anonymous in which she asks -how has the anarchic hate machine of (Fox News’s epithet for Anonymous) been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times ? - Now in 2017 we need to invert the question and ask how did the platform that gave rise to -the most adroit and effective political operation- spawned the even more adroit and effective operation Alt.right ? And more pertinently why was this once progressive domain ceded so much to the right.. why was there not a more effective fightback. why no equally powerful alt.left? The white supremacist trolls and nazi meme warriors may have had an exaggerated belief
The alt-right and the death of counterculture
Excellent postings, Brian and Keith, as always! Could a Freudian-Marxist approach a la The Frankfurt School be the way forward for critical theory here? I'm working with Jan Söderqvist on a re-reading of Freud's "Civilisation and its Discontents" for the digital age for release in 2018 myself. And I guess the approach then is a Marxist-Libertarian critique based on the assumption that Keith's fundamental question "What does it mean to be human?" could be replied in a Freudian and timeless manner as "The Journey from Childhood to Adulthood". Where Adulthood includes the originally tribal commitment to contribute (it is not about "having a job" as the lowest common denominator for the social, "having a job" is merely the capitalist imperative standing in for the proper "desire to contribute to the tribe"). So a leftist critique would have to start with the assumption that contemprary society in various ways denies its citizen the completion of the journey from childhood to adulthood, it infantilises its citizens on a massive scale by indirectly forstering them into the belief that "they have nothing to contribute" besides possibly "the job they have been rewarded". Even jobs are no longer contributions, "jobs are rewarded" these days to the loyal voters of the extreme right, this is after all both Trump's and Le Pen's most basic appeal, they claim to be "the job-rewarders". Please note that this critique would involve the education system since the education system is completely focused on "adaption to the job market" and not on "citizens getting help to self-help towards adulthood, contribution and autonomy". But it would also include a massive critique against the consumption society (check hamburger obesity etc) and from a libertarian angle an attack on the current structure of the welfare-state (anything that infantilises people would be a deserving target for critique). I believe any serious discussion on the introduction of Universal Basic Income (the left's main topic these days besides the fundamental struggle against climate change) would have to start by addressing this issue too. If UBI infantilises large parts of the population, it would amount to an anti-Freudian disaster (a dramatic surge in alcoholism, drug abuse, media additiction etc) .But if it is designed to foster the contributive impulse (way beyond any job market ideals) it would make perfect sense as the leftist rallying call for the next few decades. Could this then begin to answer the leftist utopian call of "what it could mean to be human"? Does this make sense? Or do you already include this Freudian critical perspective in your analysis? We are after all fighting the alt-right's and other extremism's "fake phalluses" wherever we look these days. But what kind of state power do we reply with? What would be the ultimate aim of our state power? Just individual autonomy through financial redistribution? Really? Or the support towards an adultisation of society, away from our current mailaise, its mass infantilisation? Best intentions Alexander Bard 2017-07-10 8:27 GMT+02:00 Brian Holmes : > Keith Hart wrote: > > >> What does it mean to be human? To be self-reliant and to belong to others. >> > > It sounds like such a simple statement. But it spans left and right, > society and autonomy, the whole and radical difference. Having lived among > the French intellectuals, I have enormous respect for the left-leaning > approach to the social whole. Having lived in the US (but not so close to > the US intellectuals, ha ha ha!) I have also developed quite a bit of > respect for the governing philosophy that mediates the relations between > individuals. > > In the past, the US won a war that allowed it to institute an > individualist framework that came to permeate international law and > diplomacy, decisively shaping the postwar world order up till now. The > "golden age of the individual" (generally known as the age of human rights) > was vitiated by the abuse of larger sovereignties, whether the > corporations, the national states, or the regional blocs, all of which > arrogated to themselves the rights that were supposedly those of flesh and > blood humans. Sovereign power gave individualism a bad name, for sure: > that's why those French intellectuals complain, and they are right to do > so. Despite the abuses, the anthropologist Rene Dumont held that in the > last instance the demands of holism had to be interpreted within the > individualist framework. He believed that, because in his day (40s through > 90s) individualism was undeniably the dominant form: the one that could > resolve the most contradictions. Private ownership of currency, and the > modicum of individual control that it offered over the quintessentially > social construct of transnational money, was the linchpin of the > individualist order, as Keith Hart (perhaps in the wake of Dumont?) has > consistently pointed out. > > I don't think any country, least of all the US
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
Keith Hart wrote: > What does it mean to be human? To be self-reliant and to belong to others. > It sounds like such a simple statement. But it spans left and right, society and autonomy, the whole and radical difference. Having lived among the French intellectuals, I have enormous respect for the left-leaning approach to the social whole. Having lived in the US (but not so close to the US intellectuals, ha ha ha!) I have also developed quite a bit of respect for the governing philosophy that mediates the relations between individuals. In the past, the US won a war that allowed it to institute an individualist framework that came to permeate international law and diplomacy, decisively shaping the postwar world order up till now. The "golden age of the individual" (generally known as the age of human rights) was vitiated by the abuse of larger sovereignties, whether the corporations, the national states, or the regional blocs, all of which arrogated to themselves the rights that were supposedly those of flesh and blood humans. Sovereign power gave individualism a bad name, for sure: that's why those French intellectuals complain, and they are right to do so. Despite the abuses, the anthropologist Rene Dumont held that in the last instance the demands of holism had to be interpreted within the individualist framework. He believed that, because in his day (40s through 90s) individualism was undeniably the dominant form: the one that could resolve the most contradictions. Private ownership of currency, and the modicum of individual control that it offered over the quintessentially social construct of transnational money, was the linchpin of the individualist order, as Keith Hart (perhaps in the wake of Dumont?) has consistently pointed out. I don't think any country, least of all the US, can win a war anymore. The individualism of both the Kalashnikov and the Internet has put an end to that. The new forms of war therefore ravage American hegemony, ever since Vietnam, and even more intensely today. The suicide belt is a perverse vindication of radical individualism against the abuses of corporate and national sovereignty. Yet each explosion in a shopping mall (or wherever it may be) hides a more integral contradiction, what James Lovelock called "the revenge of Gaia." An explosion in a shopping mall (or in Mosul, or wherever) is nothing compared to accelerated ecological change. The species need to care for the equilibria of biogeochemical cycles definitively vindicates the holist critique of the post-WWII social order. With all that, the glaringly obvious fact (which is the point of this nettime thread) is that the existing political left has almost nothing valid to say about the epochal crisis we're in. The countercultural anarchists are staunchly individualist, just like the neoliberals (only they've got molotovs rather than atom bombs). The old left holists are stridently disciplinarian, just like the neocon authoritarians (only they've got YouTube rather than Fox News). What we don't have is a powerful resolution of the existing contradictions. What we don't have is a new way to be human. thoughtfully yours, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
I have lived in Pars now for two decades and in that time I have been
sustained mainly by French economic sociologists and institutional
economists, as well as by networks taking in Latin America, Southern and
Northern Europe, Africa and South Asia. There is a dominant ideology in
these circles: the economy is dominated by capitalism, neoliberalism or
"markets" driven by English individualism, so that social or collective
considerations are marginalised, obscured or repressed. The policy
therefore is to restore society to its proper place. Sometimes this is
articulated through the idea of a commons.
C B Macpherson, in the introduction to his reader Property, reminds us that
there are only two kinds of property -- private, held exclusively against
the world, and common with inclusive access and use. The problem is that
private property is now overwhelmingly owned by public bodies, by
governments and corporations. The confusion is compounded in that private
property is still talked about as if it were individually owned objects
rather than ideas and business corporations won the human rights of
individual citizens while retaining their legal privileges.
Emile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss, in tracts ranging from The
Division of Labour in Society (1893) to The Gift (1925), attacked the
bourgeois ideology stemming from English writers like Herbert Spencer. The
industrial division of labour and the market contracts that sustain it are
not anti-social, but their social principles are usually hidden from view.
The task therefore is not to restore social interests that were previously
missing, but to build on what people already were doing along these lines
and to develop new more visible institutions and practices better able to
guarantee individual and social interests than what we have now.
Instead of tinkering with stand alone concepts like the commons or
counterculture, we have to have a comprehensive human philosophy. What does
it mean to be human? To be self-reliant and to belong to others. Both are
partial, difficult to attain and complementary. But holding two ideas in
ones head at once is apparently hard. So is the notion that self-interest
and mutuality must be combined pragmatically. Even harder is combining the
ideas that each human being is unique and part of humanity as a whole.
Kant, in Perpetual Peace, pointed out that we once roamed the earth without
restriction, but our movements are now controlled by territorial states
whose purposes include the use of armed force to maintain unequal relations
between the world's peoples. Earlier he insisted that the potential of
human reason will only be realized at the species, not the individual
level. He asked how societies were organized beyond he reach of states, at
a time when he knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for the
Napoleonic wars. The most difficult task for humanity and the last is
universal provision of social justice. The means to this end is conflict,
so that people will eventually choose law over suffering and loss.
We know that world society has degenerated since the settlement of the late
1940s, after thirty years of war and depression ended in a world revolution
linking western industrial societies, the Soviet bloc and newly independent
countries as developmental states. These gave priority to ordinary people's
purchasing power, public infrastructure and services, curbing capital flows
and economic inequality, while sustaining the biggest economic boom the
world has seen. The events of 1979-80 were a counter-revolution against
that revolution and we are still living with its priorities.
It is too late to revert to the Keynesian policies of the post-war era. The
money genie has been released from the bottle. Corporations now outnumber
governments by 2 to 1 in the top 100 economic entities of our world. They
are busy building a world society of which they will be the only effective
and responsible citizens. The American Empire still has a lot of hard
power, even if its soft power is diminished. Europeans' share of world
population in 2100 will be a sixth of what it was in 1900. Africa is the
only region whose population is growing now and its share will have
quintupled in the same period. Africa and Asia will account for around 82%
of living humanity in 2100. Is the West ("the whites") going to hand over
peacefully or go down with a fight?
And yes, we have stumbled into universal communications which may not
remain so for long. What difference does that make to our hopes for a
better future? But don't imagine that the parochial mutterings of a
self-selected group of western geeks who flourished in the 1990s will come
up with a discourse that grabs more than a tiny bit of the necessary
action. The net has to be cast much wider and what circumstances will
conspire to make that happen? Above all, if politics has to be reinvented
to meet current and future global needs, where will states be located and
is their reconf
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
On 2017-07-08 10:53, Brian Holmes wrote: > These lines, while pitched at Milo and the young sexy neofascists, > describe a lot of the cultural pranks we used to celebrate in the > festival circuits emanating out from Amsterdam. The big difference > is that until very recently, the world was stable and the pranks > were inconsequential. Now the ways that such nihilism feeds monsters > have become all too obvious. The style of paranoid critique that many > of us in the theory-world practiced is complicit in these devastating > outcomes, because no matter how bad things may be, it is one's > responsibility to seek for possible ameliorations of the common lot > - by which I mean something much more widely shared than the rarified > concept of "the commons." Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view. First, while the intuition about the necessity to interrupt the normal flows of communication was correct and has proofed to be very powerful since, there was no idea what do in the space that would thus be opened up. We could have used the time when the system was relatively stable to think about this, but we didn't. Now, the the system is falling apart, the far right is capable of imposing an even darker version of disaster capitalism. Second, both the actions and the theories remained absolutely insular. What passes as cultural/media theory still delights in jargon and obscurantism. Or, in offering hypercritical takes that create no opening (like Florian's erudite but otherwise baffling piece on public domain). There has been very little interest in offering points of translation, that is, to think about how people who are not in the same circuit could appropriate and transform for their own use, the insights they find in the theoretical perspective one offers. For me, however, the concepts of the commons still remains useful. For one, it at least points to a new social settlement, that is, towards what might fill the void of the break-down of the old order. Second, it has a certain resonance where I stand, thus it can lead unusual alliances. And, third, it's vague enough a concept so that many different strands of thinking might come into contact under this umbrella and it does have a lot of potential to be appropriated by different actors, not the least in the context of radical urban social movements. Felix PS: This focus on the meme-culture of the alt-right makes it seems like the import of ideas/tactics always goes from left to right. It has the whiny undertones of an inventor who sees his idea commercialized by others. But that's incorrect. If you look at what happens with the "Indivisible Movement", they every clearly and openly copy tactics of the tea party movement, namely to give senators and representatives hell at town hall meetings, where the politicians face the people face-to-face. And at the moment, its seems fairly successful eroding the majority for the repeal of Obama care. -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
The notion that one must condone the existing 'efforts', or suggest something better, or shut up, as anything else is supporting the 'enemy', is asinine at best. Desperately clinging to the ideals of the 19/20th century (welfare state, democracy, employment etc., plus some identity politics) is a demonstrably dead end - they got us where we are now. And no, the next time it won't be any better. The precondition of moving forward is abandoning the dead ideologies, not zombifying them. In this sense it is fully justified to point out how dead these are, without offering anything else. You are not entitled to unchallenged hobbies. Perhaps the absence of the constant chants to the past will enable some new and original thinking, which we do need, badly. I see any of that in the lifestyle movements you enumerate. On 7/8/17, 5:39, lincoln dahlberg wrote: suggestions/answers from your current thoughts and practices? For example, extremely broadly put and given your dismissal of much past intellecutal-cultural-political projects: what should critique consist of today? what of today's party politics (Corbyn, Podemos, etc?), and what of today's social-political movements? Are you suggesting a left populism (of, e.g., Laclau et al,) in # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
"the arc of social movement experience shows that anarchist/autonomist exodus strategies have reached a dead end. Unfortunately, demos like those in Hamburg are just a detail for the state, they don't spill over to the general population and their main effect is to feed the militarization of the police." I think we agree that anarchist/autonomist exodus strategies, *by themselves*, have proven to be a dead end, just as every other strategy (on its own) has. I certainly don't mean to suggest that everyone should don a balaclava to be effective. I suppose I'm interested in those moments where something more complex happens, or as you've said where "cross-class, cross-race movements" emerge that also generate "resistant community and psychic disalienation along the way." This mixture of autonomous and local cultural/political projects and a critical engagement with the institutions of the state is precisely what makes Spain such an important example for us in the present, particularly because of the anarchist histories in Spain that inform this approach that are quite distinct from the German/Italian/French autonomists. The images of the massive black bloc and burning luxury cars in Hamburg are of course on all of the newspapers' front pages, but it's also important to note that a radically diverse grouping of organizations participated in the demonstrations including ones focusing on global infrastructure, regulation, and the environment. It's also important to note that the police attacked all of this formation alike, whether at protest camps, raves, gatherings, marches, etc., regardless of the color of the attire. We're unquestionably in an interesting and volatile historical moment that also carries along all of the implicit dangers that you've described Brian, and I think that the central question we face will remain something along the lines of: How can geographically, politically, economically, and culturally diverse communities find ways of coordinating and acting in solidarity with one another against all that presently threatens all of our collective livelihood? There certainly isn't a singular answer to this (and we should oppose those who would suggest otherwise), but nonetheless producing different kinds of contingent answers to this question is what concerns me most. Let's hope we continue to find ways of producing "a break and the invention of something new" that is as contagious as it is resilient. Best, ~i On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 1:39 PM, Brian Holmes wrote: > On 07/08/2017 07:39 AM, lincoln dahlberg wrote: > >> what should critique consist of today? what of today's party politics >> (Corbyn, Podemos, etc?), and what of today's social-political movements? >> Are you suggesting a left populism (of, e.g., Laclau et al,) in stating >> "The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high ground, but to >> try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites those who resist..."? >> > > I think populism today is being done very well by the people, by many > grounded resistance movements. The heart of the left has always lain in > solidarity with disenfranchised people's struggles, as well as respect for > their autonomy, and on that I am in no way cynical: it's the fundamental > thing that you learn by participating. However, the claim of theorists to > find and formulate the secret principles that unify and guide those > struggles (as the Autonomia thinkers often did), or the claim of would-be > populists to find the rhetorical cues that can marshall them together into > one inevitable overwhelming force, both seem dubious to me. I reckon what > unites many many people on our side of the right/left divide is a > repugnance at the idea that superior force carries rights of its own, that > the outcomes of competition justify inequality, and that the consequences > of industrial exploitation can just be ignored and forgotten while others > clearly suffer them. Rather than making that awareness into a populism, I > think people who are part of the formally educated, technocratic > middle-management classes should act out of their own class position. That > means finding ways to address the abusive power of the corporate state and > its many institutions, in which we continue to participate even while we > work in solidarity and seek our own necessary disalienation. From that > angle, of course I support Corbyn's efforts as much as those of Spanish > municipalismo,although these approaches have clear differences. What's > needed to change society is really a combination of transformative local > organizing and national electoral politics, which looked as though it was > going to happen in Spain and then didn't, or not yet. > > Ian, I get the impression you are putting a lot of effort into radical > action over these recent years and I respect and admire that, but where I > tend to disagree with you is that in my view, the arc of social movement > experience shows that anarchist/aut
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
On 07/08/2017 07:39 AM, lincoln dahlberg wrote: what should critique consist of today? what of today's party politics (Corbyn, Podemos, etc?), and what of today's social-political movements? Are you suggesting a left populism (of, e.g., Laclau et al,) in stating "The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high ground, but to try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites those who resist..."? I think populism today is being done very well by the people, by many grounded resistance movements. The heart of the left has always lain in solidarity with disenfranchised people's struggles, as well as respect for their autonomy, and on that I am in no way cynical: it's the fundamental thing that you learn by participating. However, the claim of theorists to find and formulate the secret principles that unify and guide those struggles (as the Autonomia thinkers often did), or the claim of would-be populists to find the rhetorical cues that can marshall them together into one inevitable overwhelming force, both seem dubious to me. I reckon what unites many many people on our side of the right/left divide is a repugnance at the idea that superior force carries rights of its own, that the outcomes of competition justify inequality, and that the consequences of industrial exploitation can just be ignored and forgotten while others clearly suffer them. Rather than making that awareness into a populism, I think people who are part of the formally educated, technocratic middle-management classes should act out of their own class position. That means finding ways to address the abusive power of the corporate state and its many institutions, in which we continue to participate even while we work in solidarity and seek our own necessary disalienation. From that angle, of course I support Corbyn's efforts as much as those of Spanish municipalismo,although these approaches have clear differences. What's needed to change society is really a combination of transformative local organizing and national electoral politics, which looked as though it was going to happen in Spain and then didn't, or not yet. Ian, I get the impression you are putting a lot of effort into radical action over these recent years and I respect and admire that, but where I tend to disagree with you is that in my view, the arc of social movement experience shows that anarchist/autonomist exodus strategies have reached a dead end. Unfortunately, demos like those in Hamburg are just a detail for the state, they don't spill over to the general population and their main effect is to feed the militarization of the police. The lesson of the Occupy "no demands" approach was that yes, in that way you can swell a relatively autonomous movement and give it a big presence on the streets, but its very autonomy ends up as a kind of centripetal vortex, a trap in short, or at least a temporary impasse. There again I am not cynical: I think people learned that lesson and moved towards deeper and more consistent engagements in the wake of Occupy, which was a hugely positive movement despite the temporary impasse. In the US it was followed by the climate justice movement, Black Live Matter, No DAPL and the Bernie campaign among others - which are all cross-class, cross-race movements aiming at concrete institutional changes, while generating resistant community and psychic disalienation along the way. However I don't think those movements can be theorized with the post-68 anarcho-autonomist toolkit, or represented with displays of subversion that depend on the cultural/economic apparatus that is supposedly being subverted. The big theoretical/practical problem is how to rework the legitimacy, and therefore the real effects, of state power. It's obvious there will be no sudden mass exodus from the corporate state (that's exactly what did not happen in the wake of 2008), but unless a way is found to reorient capitalist development, it will result in racialized class warfare and ultimately in civilizational suicide. In fact those things are happening, along with mass exinction of other species, as people are increasingly and painfully aware. The late twentieth-century "new left" taught alienated segments of the overdeveloped societies to seek solidarity with those on the edges of the industrial system, whether in other neighborhoods of the city or other countries of the world. But there is a difference between solidarity and facile identification, where you celebrate a demonstrative radicality and check out of the whole problem of changing a complex and highly entrenched technopolitical system, which is the question that Joseph Rabie just raised in his post. From my position (I mean, both my idiosyncratic subjectivity and my race-class position) the issue is using my little sliver of intellectual agency as a writer and media-maker along with the collaborations that agency can generate i
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
> Absent of an orthodox Marxist determinism or an anarchist appeal to pure > chaotic spontaneity Except for its detractors, and pollution by right wing libertarianism, anarchy was never about chaotic spontaneity. It was (and is) about self organisation, autonomy, mutual aid and solidarity. It is effectively anti-state with respect to government confiscating what people feel should be dealt with as local prerogatives. While local organisation in such an anarchical way is attractive and could suggest a way forward (as it has done since the 19th century), one can ask whether it is a practical alternative in such a complex, technological fraught society. How will small local settlements – if one goes the way of social destructuring into autonomous groups, living in peace with one's neighbours, it goes without saying!! – deal with global issues, for example when the rising ocean waters start flooding the basements of the nuclear power plants that ring the coasts? Joe.# distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
Thank you Brian for this post, and Lincoln for the elaboration and highlighting of some of the central problems Brian posed for us. I want to respond to this in two ways, first by calling into the question the novelty of the present to some degree, and second by trying to map the dynamics / ruptures / discontinuities that are being discussed here. First, while the alt-right is certainly adept at shaping particularly marginal currents of our discourse, I think it's a huge political mistake to overestimate their organizational power or historical significance. To push this claim even further, as distracting as Trump is, he's managed to accomplish very little since his election and the media-theorist/net-time focus on his persona as an avatar of the online alt-right is equally ineffectual. Trump's election seems to have proven not the power of the channers or the alt-right, but of the normative institutions of the state and their ability to corral and capture extra-state forces. Meanwhile, the forces of the state which continue to proceed uninterrupted, organized as they are by disciplinary power and biometric governmentality, somehow drop off our collective radar entirely. Unfortunately, the alt-right has become a convenient distraction from the much more serious and urgent problems of mass incarceration, climate change, economic inequality, and perpetual war that are perhaps harder to theorize and develop political strategies around. This is all deserving of a much longer elaboration which I won't have time for here, but in short the point I would like the emphasize is that the crisis within which we live had already arrived long before Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, and the contestational terrain remains determined not by the alt-right but by the largely continuous and uninterrupted forces of the police, banks, and prisons. Second, if we want to start thinking through the forms of discontinuity which could possibly be opened in the present, then we have to in some way begin to formulate a response to Brian's important provocations: "The question is not how to condemn the kids, but how to be an adult that anyone could possibly care about. How to create a transformative outlet for the raw energy of alienation? ... The only way to keep people from reacting to the chaos in a thousand erratic and dangerous ways is to find new social forms to replace those which have become irrelevant." I think this is an impossible but necessary task. On the one hand, if the route forward were obvious or predictable to us, then the route certainly would have already been taken. And yet, on the other hand, if no such route is knowable by remains necessary, then how can we come to follow one? I apologize for framing the conjuncture we face in such a blandly abstract and philosophical way but I think this is the fundamental nature of the problem. Absent of an orthodox Marxist determinism or an anarchist appeal to pure chaotic spontaneity, I think we must attend to the recent examples of significant historical uprisings to even be able to begin to map what remains possible in the present, and this is why focusing on the alt-right is nothing more than a red herring. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the Kurdish autonomous struggles, and the Spanish Municipal movements (and more) each require our attention, study, and theorizing, to see what "new social forms" they brought/bring into being and what political and material limits they confronted. Perhaps I'm less cynical than Brian is about the longue durée of late-20th/early-21st century resistance movements. Certainly none of them have achieved what they set out to do in their most utopian aspirations, but they nonetheless continue to have effects and affects (look at Hamburg now as an example), the eventual consequences of which we cannot yet entirely know. I'll end there, and I hope that these notes can expand the scope of the conversation at least partially. Best, ~i On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 8:39 AM, lincoln dahlberg wrote: > Thank you Brian, your post is as challenging as the article, and your > personal intellectual-political struggles resonate. But it left me wanting > to ask you to fill in a little more the abstract paths forward that you > suggest and questions that you pose, as I italicize in the quotes cut from > your post just below. I understand that you are challenging others to > explore the filling of these categories and answering of these questions > (as surely this is a political project), and that you yourself have no > final answers, but for those like myself who are really floundering at this > historical conjuncture, do you or others have any slightly more concrete > suggestions/answers from your current thoughts and practices? For example, > extremely broadly put and given your dismissal of much past > intellecutal-cultural-political projects: what should critique consist of > today? what of today's party politics (Corby
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
Thank you Brian, your post is as challenging as the article, and your personal intellectual-political struggles resonate. But it left me wanting to ask you to fill in a little more the abstract paths forward that you suggest and questions that you pose, as I italicize in the quotes cut from your post just below. I understand that you are challenging others to explore the filling of these categories and answering of these questions (as surely this is a political project), and that you yourself have no final answers, but for those like myself who are really floundering at this historical conjuncture, do you or others have any slightly more concrete suggestions/answers from your current thoughts and practices? For example, extremely broadly put and given your dismissal of much past intellecutal-cultural-political projects: what should critique consist of today? what of today's party politics (Corbyn, Podemos, etc?), and what of today's social-political movements? Are you suggesting a left populism (of, e.g., Laclau et al,) in stating "The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high ground, but to try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites those who resist..."? i.e. can you, or anyone, be more concrete as to where you think one's (the left's) energies should be put today? Apologies for the sweeping enormity and impossibility of the question, but I think your post invites it and that the current situation demands that we ask it again and again. in hope, Lincoln "..The breakdown of techno-utopianism requires a sweeping reassessment, a new departure, a change of life in short. And obviously, that entails corresponding changes in cultural expression. Anyone not working on at lest those too levels is way out of date." "How to create a transormative outlet for the raw energy of alienation? How to work through the really existing institutions, towards more responsible kinds of social relations that can withstand all the stresses of imperial breakdown?" "the only way to keep people from reacting to the chaos in a thousand erratic and dangerous ways is to find new social forms to replace those which have become irrelevant the real problem of formulating and embodying those missing proinciples of production, justice and legitimate state power, which all have to be remade anew to meet the demands of the future." > > On 08 July 2017 at 20:53 Brian Holmes > wrote: > > This is one of the more challenging pieces I've read on nettime. It must > speak to many people's experience - certainly it does to mine. I wonder > if anyone else might like to repond to this one? > > > > > > The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid > > libertarian > > style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat > > uncomfortably on the > > left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against > > ghastly > > sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the > > poles of > > youth culture, allowing for an easy slippage between gaming, > > lib-hating, > > trolling, unbridled misogyny and fascism. As Nagle writes: ‘When > > we’ve > > reached a point where the idea of being > > edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive > > can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular > > people, we > > may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn > > countercultural ideals.’ > > > > > > Though I could not have imagined the alt-right at the time, after 2008 I > chose to withdraw from the European art circuit in order not to be lured > into the self-serving postures that I had analyzed years before in "The > Flexible Personality." I got into activism because capitalism was > steering society to a bad end. In the early 2000s had a serious go at > updating Marxist thoery with Toni Negri and the rest. After the crash, > when our very sophisticated leftist theories could not stir any > effective resistance, I did not want to go on inertially mouthing > stylized slogans whose patent unreality seemed to bother no one. I could > have moved from France to Spain, where the efforts of the 2000s were not > drained into art-circuit spectacle but instead drove an attempt to > change both institutional politics and daily life. But for personal and > family reasons, I chose rather to return to the US, where at least I had > to face the increasing irrelevance of both the post-68 counterculture > and the classical left. How to do this without cynicism and bitter > disavowal of one's own former strivings is, I think, one of the real > questions that confronts people of my generation, those who went through > the wild enthusiasms of the late 90s.. > > > > > > Nagle writes, ‘every > > bizarre event, new identity and strange
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
>As Nagle writes: ‘When we’ve > reached a point where the idea of being edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive > can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we > may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn > countercultural ideals.’ Sorry Fascists have always considered themselves to be in a position of moral superiority to ordinary people. That is part of its attraction. It allows smug violence in the name of moral superiority against weak and decadent people who are betraying the valued race or nation. jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture
This is one of the more challenging pieces I've read on nettime. It must speak to many people's experience - certainly it does to mine. I wonder if anyone else might like to repond to this one? The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid libertarian style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat uncomfortably on the left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against ghastly sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the poles of youth culture, allowing for an easy slippage between gaming, lib-hating, trolling, unbridled misogyny and fascism. As Nagle writes: ‘When we’ve reached a point where the idea of being edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn countercultural ideals.’ Though I could not have imagined the alt-right at the time, after 2008 I chose to withdraw from the European art circuit in order not to be lured into the self-serving postures that I had analyzed years before in "The Flexible Personality." I got into activism because capitalism was steering society to a bad end. In the early 2000s had a serious go at updating Marxist thoery with Toni Negri and the rest. After the crash, when our very sophisticated leftist theories could not stir any effective resistance, I did not want to go on inertially mouthing stylized slogans whose patent unreality seemed to bother no one. I could have moved from France to Spain, where the efforts of the 2000s were not drained into art-circuit spectacle but instead drove an attempt to change both institutional politics and daily life. But for personal and family reasons, I chose rather to return to the US, where at least I had to face the increasing irrelevance of both the post-68 counterculture and the classical left. How to do this without cynicism and bitter disavowal of one's own former strivings is, I think, one of the real questions that confronts people of my generation, those who went through the wild enthusiasms of the late 90s.. Nagle writes, ‘every bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behaviour that baffles general audiences … can be understood as a response to a response to a response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other.’ Nagle correctly identifies that this self-referential world has as its end an amoral ‘liberation of the individual and the id’, and a pathological enjoyment at the expense of an other. These lines, while pitched at Milo and the young sexy neofascists, describe a lot of the cultural pranks we used to celebrate in the festival circuits emanating out from Amsterdam. The big difference is that until very recently, the world was stable and the pranks were inconsequential. Now the ways that such nihilism feeds monsters have become all too obvious. The style of paranoid critique that many of us in the theory-world practiced is complicit in these devastating outcomes, because no matter how bad things may be, it is one's responsibility to seek for possible ameliorations of the common lot - by which I mean somehting much more widely shared than the rarified concept of "the commons." From my viewpoint, the breakdown of techno-utopianism requires a sweeping reassessment, a new departure, a change of life in short. And obviously, that entails corresponding changes in cultural expression. Anyone not working on at lest those too levels is way out of date. Liberation can no longer be the keyword for the middle-classes, that's for sure. The clarification of terms, the bracketing of difference and the weighing of utterances from different subject positions, cis-males at the bottom, all attempt to make the banality of online life urgent and political. In a manner that mirrors the data colonisation of the social by new media companies, every difference must be celebrated, problematised and deconstructed. Thus there are hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms. However the above lines are just as void as what they denounce. There is no disciplined Marxist universalism to fall back on, because the industrial proletariat was long ago bought off, functionalized and absorbed by the industrial welfare state, whose productive promise, celebrated by all true Marxists, has turned out to be a Promethean overreach culminating in climate change and the many disasters of the Anthropocene. The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high ground, but to try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites those who resist, not only fascism, but also the self-destructiove excess of liberalism. Sure, the gender-changing drives of the younger generations may be seen as a kind of escapism, but they are also an attempt to incarnate, in one's own direct experience, the
The alt-right and the death of counterculture
[Olivier Jutel wrote an extensive review of Angela Nagle's new book "Kill All Normies - Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right" (Zero Books, 2017) for the Australian journal Overland: https://overland.org.au/2017/07/the-alt-right-and-the-death- of-counterculture/ It's an essay in its own right; I'm reposting it here with Olivier's kind permission. An other, less favorable review of the same book can be read here: https://medium.com/@curple.turnle/i-didnt-like-kill-all-norm ies-very-much-225c17868d78 -Florian] The alt-right and the death of counterculture By Olivier Jutel 6.Jul.17 Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning in these perilously ridiculous times, all are products of an ascendant online culture which privileges affect and transgression. Nagle navigates a sea of anime Nazis, gamers, white nationalists, masturbation abstainers and violent misogynists in mapping the contours of online reaction and fascism. What is essential and most controversial in her thesis is the symbiosis between what we can call the ‘Tumblr liberal-left’ and the alt-right. Both are products of an online cultural vanguardism that has been lauded by techno-utopians, nominally leftist academics and journalists alike. Nagle wields a forceful critique of the online left’s aestheticised resistance as both self-satisfied and lacking the dynamism to undercut the alt-right’s discourse of modern alienation, however nonsensical. This book is not an attempt at righteously slam dunking on the basement dwelling nerds of the alt-right or rehashing the excesses of campus identitarians. Instead it takes on the ideological deadlocks of the left that have been masked by the tech-fetishism of late capitalism. The title ‘Kill All Normies’ embodies the wry humour of this book, necessary to deal with the risible nature of the alt-right and the horrifying obscenity, racism and misogyny that fuels the movement. At its origin, the alt-right amounts to a lament of web 2.0 inclusivity which ruined the memes and the ‘mean internet’ safe spaces of predominately young white male misanthropes. At its core, the alt-right is the equivalent of a new convert to punk complaining that ‘modern music today is so terrible’. In Gabriella Coleman’s book on 4-Chan and the hacker collective Anonymous, she extensively profiles the archetype troll Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev. weev is a truly contemptible figure, an avowed white supremacist and supporter of Dylan Roof who during the Trump campaign dedicated himself to ‘Operation Pepe’. As with so much of the alt-right, weev is equal parts laughable and evil, claiming that his weaponisation of Pepe the Frog memes will incite the coming race war. And despite his undeniable status as an uber-troll of the alt-right, his interview with Coleman captures a pathetic grandiosity in trying to impress the fact that he ‘was in the room when the lulz was first said’. It is so jarringly stupid to think that the renewal of fascism and white supremacy would be driven by a nerdy subcultural one-upmanship but this is the genesis of the online culture wars identified by Nagle. For Nagle, the rise of the alt-right is not so much about the ideological currency of reactionary politics but the techno-enthusiastic embrace of transgression and disruption deracinated from politics. As with many discussions on the state of the left, Nagle considers the epochal moment of ’68 and the youth-led demands for individual emancipation from hierarchy. She writes, the alt-right ‘has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan “It is forbidden to forbid!” than it does with anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right.’ Where for fifty years conservatives have been fighting sexual liberation and ‘liberal cultural excess,’ the alt-right have formulated a style which is counter-cultural, dynamic, and thrives, at least temporarily, on its own incoherency. Embodying the best traditions of conservative hucksterism, Milo has been a key figure in providing a fascist chic and garnering mainstream media access, elevating his brand and online provocations into a reactionary culture-jamming. Nagle observes that Richard Spencer’s ‘spitting disdain about the vulgarity of the US consumer culture-loving, Big-Mac munching, Bush-voting, pick-up truck owning pro-war Republican’ could be ripped from a mid-oughts edition of AdBusters. The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid libertarian style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat uncomfortably on the left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against ghastly sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the poles of youth culture, allowing for an eas
