tbyfield on Fri, 5 Jun 2020 16:27:32 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?


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.



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