Re: <nettime> Quick Review..

On 11 September 2018 at 08:56, David Garcia <[email protected]> wrote:

Yes thanks Florian- so interesting to read this mangling of Gramsci by
Yiannopolous. The extraordinary images of him cavorting in a bath of
pig’s blood in a scandalously naive (or simply cynical) NY Chelsea gallery, purportedly
mourning the lives lost to Islamic fundementalism- he looked for all the world like
a "bargain basement" Herman Nietzsche. This plumbed new depths of shock/kitch (is
that a genre there days- looking at Yiannopolous’s erstwhile friend Lucien Wintrich
photo series Twinks for Trump its beginning to look that way).
Actually this hides the more serious development that Yiannopolous’s tactics have
re-purposed the venerable Camp sensibility which he cleverly connects with Lulz, as
sharing the ability to be shocking whilst simultaneously using their respective modes
as solvents to neutralize moral indignation.

1. A couple of asides at the end of last year Wolfgang Streeck wrote a very
interesting piece for London review of Books called ‘You Need a Gun’ which
argued that Gramsci concept of hegemony could not be understood if it were seen
to be coercion free- but that coercion takes many forms with violence as a background
option always available if all else fails. Though there is much that there may be much
that Bannon and the other Gramscian’s of the new American far right get wrong but this
is one aspect they have understood quite well.

2. This is quite tenuous association but listening to your talk I thought of the English Marxist
philosopher Peter Dews’s book -The Idea of Evil- interrogates a certain bias in history
and political thought that ‘people who are pessiistic about human nature tend to be
right wing, while left wing thinkers tend to be optimistic about human nature (in Dews’s
view naively so) in a recent interview Dews declared that he wanted to disrupt this
alignment.. Whilst listening to your talk in Berlin I wondered if there was something like an
exploration of the affective consequences of such a re-alignment in your talk and the questions
that this might ask of us.

Best

David

On 10 Sep 2018, at 23:58, Florian Cramer <[email protected]> wrote:

Thanks, David - as I said in the discussion in Berlin, Stewart and I ended up
in a weird place where we practically taught the "Alt-Right" its own history.

One shouldn't read too much into its grasp of Gramsci though. This is what Milo
Yiannopolous wrote about him in the original manuscript of his book
'Dangerous' (that Simon & Schuster ended up not publishing):

And so, in the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci decided that the
time had come for a new form of revolution -- one based on culture, not
class. According to Gramsci, the reason why the proletariat had failed to
rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one's country,
family values, and religion held too much sway in working-class communities.
If that sounds familiar to Obama's comment about guns and religion, that's
because it should. His line of thinking, as we shall see, is directly
descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci. Gramsci argued that as a
precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the west -- or the 'cultural
hegemony,' as he called it -- would have to be systematically broken down. To
do so, Gramsci argued that "proletarian" intellectuals should seek to
challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media, and
create a new revolutionary culture. Gramsci's ideas would prove phenomenally
influential. If you've ever wondered why forced to take diversity or gender
studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to hate
western civilization ... Well ' ..new you knew who to blame Gramsci.

(Because of the lawsuit, the manuscript is publicly available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjc0n5dll244o2w/Milo%20Y%20book%20with%20edits.pdf?dl=0
)

-F

--
blog: https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
bio: http://floriancramer.nl

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