Brian Holmes on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:22:37 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Return of the F-scale |
This is so true, so goddamned true, Brian.
Geert, I think you have to begin with the idea that societies across the world are gripped by the Big Fear. It came in a lot of ways, the economic crash, the realization of accelerating climate change, Fukushima, Greece, the failed revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, ISIS, the refugees... The sense of an unraveling is everywhere and the old moves of "surf the chaos" or "it's gotta get worse before it gets better" are out. Latent resistance to social change is becoming direct hostility to black and female power, sexual choice, racial plurality and any new rights claims. Gratuitous transgression throws gasoline on a fire that's already big. It's time to act but the chosen path matters.
It comes with the question how critical approaches, these days, link to the world of empirical data. Do we need our own ‘big data’ projects in this respect? Is there enough theory? What would we do with the empirical evidence today?
I am for more empiricals. The left has no grip on the way the world works, neither the tonnages on the move, nor the actual software of coordination, nor the expressed preferences of populations, nor the use value that a belief system, even the worst one, can have for a human being. I am for historical studies of major crises that extrapolate to the present. I am for the expression of these things in plain English, franc parler, Klartext. Merijn is right about that. I am also for mathematics, code and twelve-syllable words when you vitally need them. Big data is vital - but it encourages the desire and the illusion of control.
Gathering data, and analyzing them is one, but what would be our diagnosis? Apart from immediate political action, would that also include therapy for the masses, as was suggested by many, from Reich to Lloyd de Maus and Theweleit? Is sexual repression also the main frame in this era? What is a non-fascist life these days? I am referring here to the debates from the late 1970s (?) that distinguished between anti-fascist action and non-fascist strategies aka life styles (Foucault had some valuable contributions here).
The danger I see on the street is that under stress, people who were centrist can tilt authoritarian, amid a vacuum that emerged over decades, while both the Old and New Lefts were absorbed into the state, the corporations, finance and the universities. The authoritarian turn happened in the Thirties and the Forties when Reich started out, and by the time you get to Foucault, generations had built practices against it. Psychologists and their radical, non-laboratory experiments were important, I agree. There are things to learn from them, especially from the years of work, the courage, the suppler equivalents of, or better, replacements for discipline. But now is a fresh historical crisis and the late, developed, mature intellectual and aristic responses to the former one are not gonna cut it. In the Western culture sphere, authoritarianism always involves a fear of women's independence and of other colors of skin, other desires and symbolic worlds. Sex is an issue for sure - tell anyone who's been gender-bashed it isn't - but the autonomy of those who were formerly subordinated is an even bigger one, and they all converge. It's time to stand with the oppressed, listen to the indigenous people, let the women speak, and you can mix those positions around, queer it. But its also time to learn to speak in your own voice about the real dangers of the present and how to build a new balance that's somehow gonna work for societies where everyone will never agree. Liberalism, even the neo kind, thinks you can destroy both solidarities and ecologies with capital injections, and then repair it a little with the surplus. That's the TPP, carbon trading, the Iraq invasion. It's not working. It's proving suicidal. But they have all the expertise. And now another faction craves the authority. You know, by simple math of wealth and access, I'm of the privileged. But I'm frankly afraid of the liberal future which is becoming equal to the authoritarian one. Intellectuals should help imagine, plan, test and build a different present, on all levels from technics to ethics to affects and back again. It takes some theory and a whole lot more. Those are my thoughts, Best to you, and thanks also to Prem for writing from India, Brian # 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: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: