<nettime> Complexity and nostalgia

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity". If you look
at the current wave of far-right strong mean, it's seems obvious their
project is the restoration of race AND class privilege AND patriarchy.

Behind this, in my view, is a jump in social complexity (globalization,
Internet, climate crises, multipolar geopolitics etc) over the last 30
years and the inability to find forms of governance adequate to
contemporary social realities.

The neoliberal center has tried to manage this through expansion of
market forces, in the best Hayekian tradition seeing the market as the
ultimate information processor [1]. At the periphery (social as well as
geographic) this never worked particularly well and in 2008, it came
crashing down in the center as well. That created a giant nostalgia for
a less complex word which the right eagerly fills.

In my view, the call to return to a more classic class analysis also has
the whiff of such a nostalgia.

We -- lets say cultural producers of any kind -- should not give in to
this. Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.

That's not all that's needed, of course, but might be one of the ways
where culture can generate agency.


















[1] Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
American Economic Review (Sept.), 35 (4): 519–30.

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