<nettime> How do we govern ourselves? (was: Mechanical Turkish)

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 10:18 PM, Blake Stimson <blakestimson@gmail.com> wrote:

My premise is that the question "how do we govern ourselves? ... with which institutions, under which rules, backed by which constraints?" that Brian raises can never be asked from the outsider standpoint of institutional critique but instead can only be asked immanently. This means first and foremost taking on responsibility in the way that Brian's “grey beard” mea culpa wisely and graciously invites.

In kindred spirit and in search of specific causes for our failure to effectively the institutional question, I referred him to a recent piece of mine [http://www.abladeofgrass.org/fertile-ground/art-social-death/] that tries to think through how a broadly defined cultural left has been prevented from asking institutional questions less by the Kochs et al and more by its own relationship to race.

Blake, I'm glad you took up this thread, and I'm also curious what Florian thinks, since he started the ball rolling.

Your essay suggests that in the face of the violence exercised by Western societies (war, domination) the more-or-less entitled, left-leaning white members of those societies have sought fulfillment or release through an identification with blacks, understood as objects of the violence. So doing, you believe the left has created an aesthetic of self-objectification or "bare life" that is directly connected to, or even the cause of, the anti-political horizontalism amd immediatism of social movements since 1968. For you this aesthetic of art-into-resistant-life is an illusion, an "armchair psychopathology" of fantasized violence that distracts from other possibilities. This is why you are positive toward my mea culpa, when I say that the media critique of the neoliberal period that I myself practiced is exhausted, or indeed, obsolete.

Now, I can't accept your whole argument, because I think you assign too much influence to art in this whole story, at the same time as you reduce it to very specific forms of vanguardism. But I do stand by what I said, and I agree with statements such as these:

-- "We will not be successful until we accept that the slogan of bare life, like the old humanist slogan of bare humanity, is political suicide."

-- "If we are to be the beneficiaries of politics rather than its rubes we have no choice but to account for and, more importantly, exercise power and thereby engage openly and knowingly with the violence that is already there in everything we do."

After developing a critique of contemporary capitalism within the philosophical/institutional context of France, where I was living in the 90s, I got involved in networked protests around 1999, because of the agency they seemed to offer. At the time, these were very broad coalitions, developing and spreading an important critique of the US-centered, financially led globalization of capital. What's more, the movements used new forms of communicative activism to target specific institutions, like the IMF and the WTO. Ideally this critique could have led to concrete changes of policy - but instead, the familiar violence of repression, amplified by September 11, succeded in breaking up the coalitions and reducing the movements to the dead ends you describe: the exaltation of structurelessness and horizontality, the ecstacy of fire and violence, the totalizing refusal of all political mediation. Some people (like in Spain) were able to go far beyond this. I didn't have the right context, so I decided to pull back and reconsider.

To me, the aesthetic of networked protest that I wrote about at the time seemed to cut two ways: it helped awaken people to the possibility of politics, but it also became an end in itself, both on the streets and in the museums. In the wake of 2008 it became clear that there would be no organized response by any fraction of the left to the literal bankruptcy of contemporary capitalism. Still I don't have such a flatly negative view as you, Blake. I thought that the whole period had accomplished a lot, by revitalizing forces of critique and resistance and opening up many new forms of communication and collaboration. But none of its promise could be realized by clinging to old tactics and old dogmas whose limits had been clearly revealed - not only in art and theory, but also in economics and politics.

There are various ways to analyze those limits, and your essay takes a psychological and aesthetic angle. A complement could be found in the analysis of civil society in its relations to the state. The advantage of this approach is that it is not only an internal critique of the left reflecting on itself, but instead, an assessment of an entire period of social history. What I call the anarcho-libertarian spectrum of the neoliberal period (1968-2008) is defined by the belief that civil society can entirely replace the sets of institutional mediations that we call, for short, the state - whether through the immediacy of community (the anarchists) or through the self-organization of entrepreneurial individuals on the marketplace (the libertarians). Neither version can successfully sustain a complex society, and both of them tend to block off any perception of the convoluted institutional mediations and the vast divisions of labor that are at pay in what is naively called "daily life." You can see this self-blinding effect on full display with all the Tea Party libertarians who expect a real-estate mogul and network TV star to "drain the swamp" that he has lived in and profited off all his life. I also think that contemporary right-wing populism, plus all the interest groups that nakedly profit from it, is doing a good job of showing leftists the need to engage with representative politics. This was the positive realization that many people took away from Occupy (including Micah White, one of the figures at the heart of Occupy, whom you quote very approvingly). To argue a little, I think your essay pays too little attention to this trend in society, which can be seen in the US everywhere from Jacobin magazine to Indivisible and far beyond. If we can now speculate about a rejuvenated Democratic party taking the House and Senate in the 2018 midterms, it's because of this politicization. (In fact, while writing this some post-Occupy type just came knocking at my door to get me interested in a first-time candidate for alderman).

I'd like to end with some specific critiques, not because I want to invalidate your approach, but just to go a little deeper into it. You write that "The difference between modern political life and modern network (or market) life is that one is about adjudicating the distribution of power according to moral principles, received wisdom and established institutions, and the other is about network relations or what we have now come to call 'the art of the deal.'" For me, this kind of declaration is where your otherwise subtle and probing essay ends up simplfying things to a binary extreme. On the one hand, this kind of statement discounts the extreme difficulty of moving existing social mores and institutions beyond a very well-established set of norms that is not only sustained by serious forms of domination, but is also frankly suicidal in its refusal to stop intensifying climate change. On the other hand, the idea that the left has simply been seduced by a market-driven aesthetics seems to minimize the direct threats that contemporary capitalism brings to bear on so many people's lives - a threat that understandly prompts flight and exodus, but also more deliberate and organized attempts at change. That second impulse is now making new political alliances possible, and once again, I am interested in those broader alliances, as I was back in 1999.

I also think art has a quite different role to play in the present context, and if we go further with this exchange, it might be interesting to discuss in a lot more detail what that role is or could be. Again I suspect we'd have some sharp differences, and maybe some strong convergences.

all the best, Brian