Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 31 May 2020, at 6:27, Felix Stalder wrote:

> I, like probably most nettimers, I have been observing the fracturing
> of the US with increasing horror (knowing that Europe, over the last
> 70 years, has usualled followed the US, for good and bad). With the
> horrific response to Covid-19, things to have now taken an even
> darker turn, compounding all the simmering structural violence into
> something, well, into what? Approaching civil war? There are certainly
> enough heavily-armed militias around who are clamoring for it. Is this
> a breaking point, and if so, what exactly is breaking?

In asking a question like this it's worth remembering that the 
declaration "_________ is broken" — education, regulation, Congress, 
misc industries, international systems — was a staple of rightist and 
self-appointed 'realist' rhetoric for several years. It's always hard to 
pin particular dates on pervasive turns of phrase like that, but the 
Google ngram for "is broken" is pretty interesting:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+broken&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0

Apparently, things stopped being broken very suddenly in 2005, and by 
2012 (when the ngram corpus runs out) everything was working perfectly. 
Curiously, the 2008 meltdown didn't even register as a blip. Anyway, now 
it all seems to be breaking — in the present imperfect tense.

These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at 
first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a 
glass or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see 
ourselves historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing 
anything and everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all 
you can do is *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with 
almost hilarious precision...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rebuild%2Crebuilding%2C+is+broken&year_start=1980&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Crebuild%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crebuilding%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cis%20broken%3B%2Cc0

...but a world where things *are breaking* all around us is a different 
kettle of fish, and it's very much in the present.

Reading this thread is depressing. Steve says, "Is anything breaking? 
No, nothing is breaking. The structure is safe," a proposition that will 
always be true on some level. And Brian says, "Of course, nothing has 
changed in America in our lifetimes." I can think of quite a few people, 
ranging from LGBTQIers who enjoy freedoms to ~students who recognize 
their lot will be depths indentured servitude, both to degrees barely 
imaginable a few decades ago. But, yes, our analyses must at all costs 
privilege *the system*. These aren't just accidents of phrasing; the 
mistakes pervade the analyses, as when Brian noted that "Something like 
it did happen during the Great Depression. But at that time the 
electorate was not so deeply divided by racial issues." Well, yeah, it 
took another 30 years before whites finally allowed blacks to vote... 
But these are all details. The larger picture is that their commentaries 
feel more like old people going around in familiar well-trodden 
analytical circles than responses to the uncertainties opening before 
us. To say that there are none is plainly silly. Just a few months ago, 
say the end of January, today's headlines was yesterday's near-term 
sci-fi.

What's breaking is any remaining faith in the last vestiges of trust in 
government. But the problem with formulations like that is their 
reliance on negation. Hence, for example, the inability of major media 
outlets to affirmatively describe Trump and his actions: he doesn't 
"lie," he "states, without evidence." He's said to be *in*competent, 
*un*hinged, *in*sane, *in*coherent, and all the rest. These negatives 
don't say what he *is*, they describe the limits of our vocabulary. So, 
yeah, he's breaking norm after norm, tradition after tradition, rule 
after rule, law after law — but, like "is broken" above, those all 
speak of the past. They don't say what affirmative structures he's 
building. The question isn't what old things are breaking, it's what new 
things are building: the absolute certainty — faithlessness — that 
government at every level is atomized, myopic, arbitrary, and violent.

When it comes to details Trump bobs and weaves, makes crazy threats only 
to back away from the silently, but when it comes to the big picture he 
says what he'll do and does what says. The snobbishly inclined sneer 
because they insist on niceties like grammar, syntax, logic, philosophy, 
the rule of law, procedure and policy, the separation of powers, etc, 
but Trump is building his dystopia by, almost literally, hurling shit at 
the wall and seeing what sticks. The majority of the US's left / prog / 
Dem blob impotently shakes its head at his endless stream of 
"hypocrisy": "He said he'd drain the swamp but he's really filling 
it!!!" Hypocrisy relies on rules, though. What Trump and the GOP are 
delivering, again, is positive: they're proving that you don't need to 
be constrained by sense, principle, consistency, logic, or anything 
else. In effect, they're deregulating subjectivity and delivering a 
palpable model of freedom to their constituencies, one in which we don't 
even need formal relations like "analogy" to connect corporations, guys, 
guns, trucks, because they all blur together into a single effluvium. 
"Drain" was the junior partner in Trump's campaign promise; "swamp" was 
boss, and he's delivering it in spades, corruption as far as the eye can 
see. "American carnage": can anyone even remember what he actually said 
*about* it? Maybe, but they're a tiny, tiny minority; what the 
overwhelming majority see is that he said it a lot and now he's 
delivering carnage in spades. Not on his promises but on his 
*impressions*.

Under Trump, our historical horizon has shrunk from years to months to 
weeks to days, and even hours feel speculative now, marked by a sort of 
open sewer of news: we watch events float by, one shittier than the 
next, and marvel, JFC, was that huge turd just *a week ago*? It feels 
like a year! Under the circumstances, it's very hard to imagine, let 
alone predict, what will happen. But a normal election followed, 
possibly, by an orderly transition to a Democratic winner seems 
unlikely. Since 2016 Trump has produced close at least a half-dozen 
arguments about why he's entitled to more than four years: two years 
were "stolen" by Mueller, conspiracies of every size and shape from the 
Do-Nothing Democrat Congress to the Deep State, and of course endlessly 
rigged elections, fraudulent voting-by-mail, and so on. As the election 
approaches he's sure to revive and amp up these arguments; and if the 
electoral tide turns against him, the noise about them will be 
deafening. If one states vote delivers votes for him by mail, fine; if 
another doesn't, FRAUD. And his inconsistencies will only prove, even 
further, that he embodies the freedom he promises his supporters.

The feckless Democratic leadership has slowly been clutching at its 
pearls about this, but the notion that they'll present an unstoppable 
threat backed up with force is ridiculous. And in their fever dreams 
they say mutter about how he might "cancel" or "postpone" the election, 
but a far more likely outcome is what he always threatens and sometimes 
does: produce a blizzard of litigation that exploits the judiciary's 
structural weaknesses — consultation, deliberation, and process. All 
he really needs to do is delay a result past Inauguration Day, the 
bullshit it from there, say, by changing the forum from the courts to 
public opinion.

Debates about what constituencies the Dems need to maintain in order to 
win are crucial, because our only real hope is to return to a semblance 
of sane governance. But the US left, such as it is, hasn't connected the 
dots yet. The last years of debate about "antifa" are concerned with 
whether or how the use of force is legitimate at the most basic tactical 
level. These debates aren't mirrored in other registers 'above' the 
tactical, which usually get lumped together under the banner of 
'strategy.' These debates have been vital for decades in communities 
that are continually threatened by physical violence, notably African 
Americans and Native Americans. But the idea that the use of popular 
force might be needed for the left as whole to advance its agenda 
remains off limits in polite society, dismissed ad "violence" and 
derided as lunatic. My point isn't to *endorse* force; but there's no 
question that the left's words would carry more force if they were 
backed up by the threat of force. This is what the right does, and it 
seems to work.

Cheers,
Ted



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