Re: <nettime> Constitutioanl radicalism

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 2017-10-14 03:30, Brian Holmes wrote:
> "Has critique run out of steam?" asked Bruno Latour around ten years
> ago. It was a significant question.

I think there are two way to address this question.

One relates more to culture and as to do with the information overload
online and is best summed up in the infamous line about online content
"If you don't like it, it probably wasn't made for you". Meaning that
there is no shared frame of reference from which to develop a critique
that would be relevant to the other (who disagrees but still shares the
framework in which the critique is meaningful).

The other one is, I presume, what Latour has in mind. The task at hand
is less a deconstructive one (that, it seems has been achieved), but a
constructive one. Not how to take things apart, but how to put them
together differently. And all of Latour's work seems to go in that
direction, in his exhibition work (How to Make Things Visible), but also
in books such as "Politics of Nature" or his idea of the "Parliament of
Things".

As long as there is no shared idea about how to put humpty-dumpty
together again, all our critique will only fuel the far right, because
it increases the void that they claim to fill.

There has to be a narrative that works from the most abstract to the
concrete, on different scales and in different cultures. Gaia science,
which I also believe to the the most relevant techno-scientific
perspective today, is too isolated to do that alone. There need to be
ways to connect this with other discourses, practices and cultures.

The bits and pieces for this are laying around: eco-feminism, p2p
economy, buen vivir, ubuntu, commons, UBI, permaculture, green tech, big
data etc. But they are neither coherent or can they form the basis for
complex social coalitions (like economic nationalism at the moment does)
in the mold of what that Alex Foti is envisioning is the last chapter of
this General Theory of Precariat.

http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ToD25-Precariat-AlexFoti.pdf

Felix






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