| Felix Stalder via nettime-l on Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:25:52 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism |
Hi Brian,I think it's worth keeping things a bit separate, even if they’re all connected.
The attack on art institutions is part of a larger right-wing attack (enthusiastically carried out by the left in Germany, an issue in and of itself that requires as much psycho-analysis and political analysis) on critical discourse itself, well any kind of what used to be called “public discourse”. At the moment it's art institutions and universities (see, Florida, the US House hearings, but also the general sentiment, growing in Germany, against postcolonialism as antisemitic (high-brow anti-woke)). Yesterday (and tomorrow again), it’s targeting public broadcasting iN Europe or anything else that adheres to, well, a kind of Habermasian discourse ethic (facts, logic, coherence, details, and nuances).
And that, I think, is precisely the problem and contributes to center/left weakness and the silence. That model does not work anymore. It presupposes a kind of middle-class society that doesn't exist anymore. Some of the reasons for its collapse are positive (the expansion of access to public speech is, in my view, still a net positive) others are devastating (social inequality. racist/anti-immigrant mainstreaming), but either way, as an intellectual environment, it doesn't exist anymore.
We can speak "truth to power" all day long. Millions are marching against the war in Gaza. But, simply, arguments don't count. Beyond the actual leaks, the real revelation of Wikileaks was that knowledge is NOT power. Power is power.
But it's more than that, power doesn't speak anymore, it doesn’t need argumentative justification, not even dishonest one. Has Trump ever made a single argument? No. Contemporary power counts. By that, I don't mean that it's obsessed with money -- sure it is, but that is no news -- but the dominant way of understanding reality has shifted. It's statistical, that is, based on correlating endlessly shifting patterns, using volatility as a resource. Logical coherence doesn't matter and producing logically coherent arguments has become an aesthetic practice (it's not a coincidence that most of us, myself included, work in the art field). This also contributes to why cultural institutions themselves fold so easily. They are focussed on numbers (rather than articulating discursive positions) themselves.
If you look at the ideologies and “theories” that underlie, say, Silicon Valley (longtermism, effective altruism, etc), they are all intellectually laughable, they are not really worth engaging through coherent critique. It’s boys getting high on patently stupid ideas. But they are incredibly powerful, not as logical ideas, but as an organizing principle for a new hegemony driven by numbers. That goes well together with the far-right, because they were never interested in discourse, so they can operate in a post-discursive environment.
This is, in part, why I don’t feel so energized to engage in these debates at the moment. But, as you see, I do!
Felix On 12/19/23 21:19, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
Hey nettimers, This is the perfect time to be silent! After all, we are all about freedom of expression and debate. So let's seize the opportunity to say nothing while our societies take a decisive turn toward the repression of conflicting views. We could all go back to talking about ChatGPT, heck, we all could just chat with ChatGPT. The benefits of self-canceling are many: --No little irritations or disagreements during spectacular genocides. --No inquiry about that depressing climate change. --Good practice getting ready for the shift from a liberal police state to authoritarian fascism. --Above all, no disruptive arguments breaking the technological flow. Seriously, how to live in this time? And how to talk about it? What's happening to the Oyoun space in Berlin is one of the many closures that public silence permits. When Andrew Ross launched the first "Silence" thread on nettime, he insisted on the difference that public discussion makes, even though every opinion is partial, no one is fully informed, and many mistakes are made. Ross was right, and in the US, according to polls published this morning, that very loud and chaotic thing called public opinion has turned against the continuing US military support for the genocide in Gaza, despite powerful threats to shut up or lose your job, get gassed in the street, be doxxed on billboard trucks cruising around the city, etc. It is not clear what concrete effects this change in public opinion will have, either on the resupply of arms for mass murder, or on the continuing pressure both moral and legal that weighs on opponents of the war. But at least there is still space for reasoned and impassioned differences of opinion. It's worth reading all the links in Podinski's last post. For everyone involved with art and culture, the sudden sea-change in Germany is a very big deal. In just over a year, the institutions that offered the most support and brought the largest publics to challenging artists and thinkers from around the world have either radically changed their policies or come under opprobrium and official attack. This situation will hopefully evolve as the new version of Berufsverbot (shall we call it Sprachsverbot?) is contested by the large numbers of people, especially cultural professionals, who just yesterday supported all that challenging art and thinking. However I doubt there will be any restoration of the old consensus. We really need new ideas and new expressions that match the urgent complexity of the present moment. What's happening under the deadly shadow of climate change is a revolt against the Western hegemony that took form in the post-WWII period. Something similar was tried in the 1960s-70s, but at that point, there were no economies on the scale of BRICS. Now, the unipolar moment is over and even within the Western countries, the consensus has broken down. A willingness to fight has arisen in its place. That's provoking tremendous fear, understandably so by the way (just try and be entirely calm as you read about the possible consequences of the Houthi missile attacks in the Red Sea). Fear is very dangerous for democracies, as you can see in the current frenzy of liberal thought-policing and in the new crop of neo-fascist leaders kicking up seemingly everywhere. It will take, not just loud dissent, but also much public argumentation, to strike a course that leads neither to wider war, nor to authoritarianism. The question of how to live in this time is real. How to pay attention, what to express, what stances to take, how to avoid overwhelming anger and/or despair. Although downplaying the value of posts that break a very real silence seems to me frankly ridiculous, still on the other hand, yes, I agree with Ted about the need to go beyond existing political rhetoric in an attempt to see commonalities between diverse groups of people and diverse geographical situations. I do not think the ideals of the 1960s-70s hold good in the present, much less the communisms and left fronts of the 1930s. And yet letting the old aspirations to equality and justice just disappear would be the worst outcome. I for one would be very glad to hear more from people on the list about what difficulties they are facing in public life, and what ideas they have about how to overcome them. best to all, Brian On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 10:05 AM podinski via nettime-l < [email protected]> wrote:Liebe Nettimers, to cont. thoughts on this thread... We will retain the original frame/ title... We just had the odd and extraordinary fortune of being able to see Masha Gessen in person make the Heinrich Boll Stiftung look like utter muddling political f/tools and morally bankrot, as was already apparent to so many of us... especially to all the diverse migrant communities... and all those who have ever had the lovely experiences of the Ausländerbehörde ( immigration office ) who get to decide your fate, and if you have permission to stay, live and work in De. ... and/Or all those other migrants who are in detention Lagers, awaiting asylum applications to be accepted, or have already been rejected. The latter of course highly are unlikely have time to investigate all the intricacies of this Middle East furor, because they are tucked away in remote isolated fucked up detention facilities, w/ very restricted access to normal lives. Gessen's latest visit to DE almost didn't happen... her Hannah Arendt prize was almost rescinded, and the ceremony that should have been at the Bremen City Hall with hundreds of seats, was instead moved to a private dinner... w/ room for about a dozen guests ( if we heard that number correctly ). She had to correct the Boll Stiftung hosts/politicians, who said they honored to have here her and are very interested to create open dialogue on the issues. This was extremely disingenous, i.e. Total Bullshit ! Gessen was in excellent diplomatic / ninja form ! And it may never have occurred, had it not been for bold solidarity actions from other writers like Sanaz Azimipour: https://www.theleftberlin.com/my-statement-on-the-heinrich-boll-foundations-decision-to-withdraw-from-awarding-the-hannah-arendt-prize/ ... This is part of the "Silence on The Rising Fascism" that we wished to alert the Nettime list to. It was a slight rhetorical trick to perhaps get more readers engaged by referencing previous posts. The orig post was pointing to very real and urgent situations that require informing the public and mobilizing community responses ! Because if the wide variety of voices cannot find public spaces to speak out then we cannot put proper pressures on the actors and supporters of fascist war crimes and racist ideologies and neo-colonial structures ! Btw Oyoun, which we put in our original post as a local pragmatic story, which requires urgent solidarity. It would be fantastic to see cultural venues and cultural workers from all over over Europe and elsewhere spread this news and show that they will not accept this kind of censur. And btw, NINE WORKERS at Oyoun face losing their visas to live and work in DE, if their job contracts are not upheld at Oyoun. They are not ALLOWED to look for employment elsewhere That is how the thick notorious DE bureaucracy fucks with peoples lives and their freedoms of expression. And this will continue to get worse in situations like having to fight off false accustaions of anti-semitism. Again a link to Oyoun ( this one is the Open Letter ), which no one here on Nettime seems to have read and give any attention to : https://oyoun.de/en/news/offener-brief-oyoun-muss-bleiben/ ... Dont have time to go further on Gessen's extraordinary visit, but here is a very quick XLT encapsulation: Many more things to say about Masha being hosted at Heinrich Boll. It was very unsettling just to see her placed on the Hot Seat being more or less interrogated about her writing by three Germans who tried to dissect her, with very visiable uniformed and armed COPS sitting in corner the room ( presumably for protection, but also like guardians of the German political stance on the State of Israel ) ! It's not Masha who should be on trial, it's fascists in state power perpetrating war crimes that need to be challenged and taken apart ! The whole evening was spent mostly having to defend the Ghetto comparisons to her idiot low level inquisitors, rather than taking the discussions into a more radical direction of actual political interventions to STOP THE GENOCIDE ! ... if we have time, we'll try and take it further in a Subslack form. ... We hope the conversation on Nettime gets a little more inspired ! All the best The XLterrestrials p.s. For those who want to watch Gessen's talk at Boll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4yypPG-OE <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb4yypPG-OE> And Samantha Hill on Arendt prize situations ( pretty feirce for a Guardian analysis ) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/18/hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/18/hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essayOn 18/12/23 18:52, [email protected] wrote:Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to [email protected] To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.servus.at/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [email protected] You can reach the person managing the list at [email protected] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: the silence on the rising fascism / non-violence (Christian Swertz) 2. silence on the lam(bs) (Ted Byfield) 3. Re: the silence on the rising fascism / non-violence (Andreas Broeckmann) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:27:41 +0100 From: Christian Swertz <[email protected]> To: nettime l <[email protected]> Subject: Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism / non-violence Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Hello, Am 18.12.23 um 10:59 schrieb Fr?d?ric Neyrat via nettime-l:https://www.trans-planet.org/abolishing-the-world-order-in-a-radical-ceasefireThank you for this hint - I actually wasn't aware of it and enjoyed reading it. I have one question about the text, considerably about this statement: "There is no Call that is not a call to organization". As far as I see, organisation is only possible if you make a distinction between organised and non organised people - at least in a political context. But than you continue with an invitation to contribute artworks, which is obviously located in an artistic context. Thus my question is: Do you consider art as politics or politics as art? BTW: It is great that it is emphasised that (nearly) all people suffer from wars - we are all people (even if there are certainly better ways than war to draw attention to this).-- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: https://www.nettime.org # contact: [email protected]
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