Re: <nettime> Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion

Hi Florian, thanks to you and Angela Nagle for the fascinating discussion in Berlin.. I wish I had been present but at least we have the recording..

I take your point that you and Angela soon took the conversation away from sub-cultures and as you indicate in the paragraph below the focus is very much on transgression rather than sub-cultures per se, you wrote:

If my memory doesn't fail me too badly, then both Angela Nagle and me tried to focus more on the subject matter of transgression. Transgression isn't exclusive to what is conventionally called "subculture" at all, but a leitmotif in modernist and contemporary arts, in social, political, sexual and media activism, to name only the most prominent areas. What both of us tried to reconstruct is how transgression has never been an exclusive property of the political left, but has been propagated and practiced on both extremes of the political spectrum, or - better said - in discourses whose politics were, often intentionally, ambivalent. Here, we both referred to Sade as a forerunner (whose ambivalence of enlightenment and its other had already been analyzed in Adorno's and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment).

The main point of transgression not being the property of the left or neccesarily the source of a progressive direction of travel is clear.

But actually I think that Angela goes further than you when at a certain point in the discussion when she asks:

"So the question for me on the sub-cultures question; are we to conclude that subcultures itself is just a neutral thing and that it can take on any

political form?” My guess is her answer would be no...In the discussion you don’t take her up on this point..

My guess is that her position is that transgression is not neutral but to be avoided is something Iconclude because in her book she argues that the

fetishisation of transgression culminates in the 1960s counter-culture of Altamont and the Manson Murders which she asserts is the “logical culmination

of throwing off the shackles of conscience and consciousness, the grim flowering of the id’s voodoo energies”. I suspect that the rise of the altright with

all its occultist overtones (Kek etc) confirms this bias for her.

I am interested in whether you are on the same page on this question as Angela on this.. ?

This is not a trivial question as the kind of answers we might give to this question will have profound effects on the way we do politics.

Best

David

# 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

--
I'm on diaspora*, a non-corporate social network: https://social.gibberfish.org/people/a76da580ba9b013533100007cb0b1a05

# 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: