Re: <nettime> from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

Hi Brian, Max,

great to have Shelley join Wordsworth in the thread!

thanks for re-assembling my contradictions (an old marxist habit) and for the helpful tips on reading matter

I'm beginning work on a hypothesis about aesthetic politics, so very timely

two notes, which I believe are also (dialectically) connected. Marx talks about the formal and real subsumption of labour: 'formal' means I work, i get paid - formally that's a commodity exchange. But labour was really subsumed in the factory where discipline and interchangeable hands complete the real subsumption

In the 19th century, say with the invention of corn-flakes packets, consumption begins to be formally subsumed: a commodity exchange. Network capital completes the real subsumption of consumption, where the act of consuming (or often multiple acts) are themselves productive of value (some of this I owe Jodi Dean and her ide aof compulsory communication). I know this is not a universal experience: but I fear the legacy of colonisation and pauperisation is that the reserve army of the unemployed is now joined by a reserve army of incompetent consumers, and that both are redundant in a system that recognises only fully subsumed labour and consumption. The global epidemic of mental illness and the manipulation of stress and anxiety by capital in the form of national-populism thrives on the precarity this brings with it

second thought: shifting politics to the aesthetic terrain of global governance is driven by two factors:

First that national populism is defined by an ethnically (and therefore exclusively humanly) defined nation (allowing for varying degrees of tolerance, assimilation and familiarity of select 'ethnicities');

Second the significance of protocols, formats, platforms and their limited interoperability (networks are not media as such, and though perhaps share a profound p[rincipl;e with natural and historical processes are managed and operated under highly sp[ecific conditions - just as human bodies are broadly alike over time and space but operate and are managed differently in different situations)

the politics of the aesthetic governance of global standards may be one critical terrain for contesting the twin process of the subsumption of consumption and the political economy of human exclusion; and is the only one that operates at the global level required to address the excluded and colonised ecology

this seems to have wandered a long way from Brexit . . . but to quote an American poet, "what you depart from is not the way"

sean

Sean Cubitt

Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

Goldsmiths, University of London

New Cross, London SE14 6NW

From: Brian Holmes <[email protected]>
Sent: 24 August 2019 15:19
To: Sean Cubitt <[email protected]>
Cc: Max Herman <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: <nettime> from Meatloaf to penalty Shoot Outs

I wonder if this is the first nettime thread to include a Wordsworth poem?

Some of Sean's seemingly contradictory points could be thought together:

This is the message of Greta Thunberg's inspiration to the next generation - rethinking the world /with/ the world.

and

Maybe the next political revolution would have to start at that level of expert-managed global infrastructures

Far as I can see, there is an aesthetic shift taking place across much of the world. It is double. On one hand it's about retelling and redramatizing the histories of colonization, to find out how today's forms of domination emerged, and to oppose them at all levels of existence and coexistence. On the other it involves a new attention to non-human life and ecological processes, to draw out what bioregionalist Peter Berg called "figures of regulation" for the guidance of human conduct. These two sides are linked theoretically, but also in grassroots practice, which is driving a lot of the theory. The difference from a Schiller-type "aesthetic education" is that this is not just about play, imagination etc. Instead it unfolds in confrontation with real forces, often the most destructive ones.

The question is, can such an aesthetic have any effect at all on "expert-managed global infrastructures," where the rubber of industry hits the road of transnational logistics? The recent declaration by the US Business Round Table is a case in point. They say the purpose of a corporation can no longer be that of "maximizing shareholder value," which was the mantra of financially driven globalization. Instead the corporation must deliver value to everyone with whom it engages, including employees, suppliers, consumers and supporting communities. Such a statement is an index of corporate fear. Apparently if you're smart enough to run a bank, then 11 years after an extremely destructive financial crisis you start to notice the overwhelming signs of societal breakdown, ecological collapse and the specter of great-power war.

When the counter-globalization movement tried to confront expert-managed global infrastructures twenty years ago, the aesthetic was mostly neo-Dada. Since it was all about surprise and indeterminacy, it could offer little resistance to the forms of stimulation, seduction and deceit that networked media has directed at anxious populations. Can the new aesthetic do better? It's definitely not just about the meatloaf. It's about felt and instituted norms for the drawdown of suicidally expansive global capitalism.

best, Brian