Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Felix – I know Castells casts a long shadow in your thought, but not 
so much in mine. It isn't an accident that systemic thinkers emerged in 
some cultures, like Castells in Spain and the Annalistes in France, but 
not so much in others. US intellectualism isn't known for its rigorously 
systematic qualities, and in many ways that's an organic expression of 
the US itself — its cultures, its sheer scale, its geography, and all 
the rest. So we should think twice about analyses that tend to ignore 
decisive patterns — and one that's becoming disorientingly obvious is 
just how erratic is the illogic of US politics. *That* is one of our 
'structures.'

{{ Douglas Bagnall put it well:

> On Felix's original question, I don't have a lot to say that wouldn't
> be improved by me not saying it. I am wary of predicting breaking
> points in America -- more so than in normal countries where it is
> already tricky -- because, you see, they *value* chaos over there. I
> don't mean an anarchic freedom (though they have pockets of that of
> course) but a seething mass of officious disorder. I realised this
> after spending five minutes in LAX. Like, we can say the police are
> terrible, they need to be fixed/replaced/exiled/whatever, but we are
> not talking about one institution, rather thousands or tens of
> thousands of autonomous outfits that have an association with the
> brand "police". The depressing definition is they carry a badge and a
> gun. How can something so splintered be reformed or broken?

}}

When we see nationwide eruptions — challenging how populations are 
racialized, the carceral state, the maldistribution of public resources, 
and so on — of course these structures have been in the making for 
decades or even centuries. On that basis we can conclude that not much 
is new, or that what is new is only ephemeral. So, yes, trust in liberal 
democracy has been in decline for a long time, pressure has been 
building, and it was sparked by a constellation of arbitrary events: one 
among thousands of zoonotic viruses, the death of handful of African 
Americans among countless others, a rootless conman-impresario 
crystallizing the merger of media and politics. But I've lost interest 
in that kind of approach, because it's plainly conservative — for 
example, in the way it marginalizes the political potentials of younger 
people. Not a century ago, they had little overt cultural or political 
impact, in large part because they had little discretionary wealth; now 
the patterns of how they allocate their money have immense, refractory 
impact. Systemic analyses can roughly describe how that impact lurches 
around, but only by becoming so abstract and removed as to be useless 
— in the same way that, say, semiotic theories can only explain what 
the hell is up with memes only by ignoring their specificity. But, in 
the US at least, their ridiculous details are becoming increasingly 
decisive.

That's particularly true on the far right, which has descended into an 
orgy of signification, with networks like QAnon and the even stranger 
(imo) pileup of references: Hawaiian shirts and palm trees, igloos, 
camouflage, paramilitary imagery (Jokers, Punisher, 'thin blue line' 
flags, AK47-like AR15 silhouettes, guillotines and wood-chippers — and 
I'm not even getting into the wordplay. In the same way that 
pearl-clutching about how cruel the Trump administration is misses the 
point ("gleeful cruelty *is* the point"), waving away this epidemic of 
signification misses it as well: *of course* these specific images, 
motifs, and puns are arbitrary, senseless, ephemeral. But the *glee* 
that attends this mayhem isn't.

So, like I said in my last mail, conventional negations only get us so 
far. Saying, well, trust in liberal democracy has been on the decline 
across the West for decades — yes, of course. But the *gleeful* 
destruction of everything from postwar international system to 
protestors' bodies, that's a different kettle of fish. In particular, 
pleasures — sadistic, nihilistic, fatalistic — are being mobilized 
'at scale' to create new world disorders.

I couldn't agree more with what you say about effects becoming causes; 
and I think that kind of causal inversion, which is really a temporal 
reversal, is the key to understanding why the narratives of so many 
systemic analyses are collapsing. But, again, it's time to stop dwelling 
so comfortably on the ruins and ask a more frightening question, which 
is what is being built?

(Also: a few people pointed out that Google's corpus and/or ngram system 
is broken. Thanks to all.)

Cheers,
Ted


On 3 Jun 2020, at 3:59, Felix Stalder wrote:

> > 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...
>
> Perhaps I was unclear, or insufficiently versed US conservative
> rhetoric, but my intention was not inquire about things that
> are broken (and hence in need of fixing) but about historical
> discontinuities, about possible breaks with established patterns that
> open up space for new dynamics, for the better or worse.



#  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: