Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls" and back on track

Hi Iain,

You're right about the "deep intergenerational transmission of a culture of resistance."

About the anecdote, just some context: the journalist was asking this question in reminding Macron's "Make the planet great again" vs "Make the USA great again," so the interviewed person was explaining that it's necessary to, first, make the USA great again in order to, second, save the planet. This is then that the the interviewee used the analogy, doing so putting Europa in the position of a child and the USA in a parent position... Nationalism, I think, we can call that, "right"?

And concerning the oxygen mask: let's hope it will not take too much time to find it.

All the best,

Frederic

On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 10:45 PM Iain Boal <[email protected]> wrote:

Frédéric: You say "To be a rightist is the opposite way: me first; then, maybe, the world (I heard on France Info (French radio) someone in Texas saying: First, the USA, then the planet; "it's like parents in a plane: first;, they put on the oxygen mask; then, they can take care of children"- that's the essence of the right)."

Putting on an oxygen mask is, surely, not a case of ‘me first’ but simply the condition of possibility of taking care of the children. I’ve rejected positing this kind of scenario - favored by Jesuits and other specialists in situation ethics - even since I was required to argue, in a ‘balloon debate’ at school, the case for throwing overboard one of the following: the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Queen Mother or Mahatma Gandhi.

In general, I don’t believe we get to the essence of human nature or political allegiance by studying - or imagining - people’s reactions in extremis. In any case the remarkable story of the Chamonnais under Nazi occupation, told by Philip Hallie in Lest Innocent Blood be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There, offers a profound challenge to any glib account of the relation between politics and morality, and attests to the power of deep intergenerational transmission of a culture of resistance.

Iain

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Hi Dan, hi Angela,

Thanks for your posts.

Just an idea about morals and politics:

- When the most important thing is me, myself, my identity, my job, my work, my resentment, my religion, etc., we are in the realm of morals and revenges and trials (and lawyers and money and punishments) reign;
- I would say that politics begins when I speak about a situation that does not concern me first, but someone else, a stranger, a foreigner, an embodiment of gender or sexuality that is not exactly mine (it has not to be completely other, of course).

So politics begins with an impossible identification, and it is this impossibility that is the proof that a real plurality, not a homogeneous community but an heterogeneous assemblage, is at stake. It is also the proof that I don't speak for but with someone else.

I try to remember what Spivak says about the subalterns, it's something like: speaking instead of subalterns is maintaining the voiceless, but considering that their situation is their business only is also a way to maintain oppression. A double bind that has to be negotiated, and undone, in every specific situation.

Another recollection: Deleuze saying that to be a leftist is to begin with "le lointain," the world, the horizon, what is far away, and then, only in a second moment, we can see how that concerns my situation. To be a rightist is the opposite way: me first; then, maybe, the world (I heard on France Info (French radio) someone in Texas saying: First, the USA, then the planet; "it's like parents in a plane: first;, they put on the oxygen mask; then, they can take care of children"- that's the essence of the right).

In solidarity,

Frédéric

On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 7:13 PM Angela Mitropoulos <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 11:30, Dan S. Wang <[email protected]> wrote:
The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,

Dan,

I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.

I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the former's claim of universality was challenged. I don't see how this could be described as depoliticisiing so much as the very opposite: heightened conflict, including over the use of resources, and labour (which presumably also includes things like enormous pay disparaties, sexual harassment which involves employers and coworkers treating other workers' bodies as their unlimited property, and so on).

As to the separate issue of the way this heightened conflict is handled, I think there are better explanations than Millennials are doing it wrong.

There is a longstanding approach that treats fascism as if it were a variety of sin (the Catholic philosopher Girard, for instance). I could not disagree more with that understanding of fascism, or politics more generally. But with regard to the US, the growing influence of evangelicals and religious conservatism more generally has tended to displace a concept of people doing awful things that people can change with a concept of good and evil. This is hardly down to Millennials. At the same time, evangelicals and conservative Catholics have adopted a pretty selective, exculpatory response to awful things that powerful people (powerful white men) do, which suspends judgement because only God can posthumously judge what is in someone's heart etc. It's obviously highly selective, given the growth of mass incarceration, extra-legal and legitimated violence, that has been directed, in the main, against black people, people of colour (think border violence), and women.

Add to this the way in which a younger generation have been thrown to the wolves as a consequence of increasingly precarious conditions of work and highly restrictive conditions on welfare, I am not surprised that part of the pushback involves an insistence on the powerful being held to account for their actions. In this world. I disagree, strongly with moral economic theories (Catholics like Polanyi and Mouffe peddle this mysticism far more than any Millennial). But I can't bring myself to fault young people for insisting on accountability and change.

best,
Angela

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