<nettime> The Problem with Post-Enlightenment: It's Far Too Dark

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

++++++++


In 2026 the nettime discussion list presented a fair number of dots, many of them connected, relating to how we got into the current hot cauldron of soup we are in.  There was some blame aspersed as well as some soul-searching and hard looks in the mirror.

This questioning process will go on for some time, but there's also gain in not being too static.  Sometimes the path out of uncertainty is uncertain steps whose direction doesn't become clear or consistent right away.  There's trial and error, and experiment, pending further results.

Therefore to stop the US fascist party this midterm election we must amplify "#ExperienceNewRenaissance" to the highest possible degree, or its close equivalent, this email shall argue.  Uncertain?  For sure!

+

One hard truth we must consider is whether the progressive embrace of post-enlightenment theory got coopted and absorbed by the tech-right.  It's hard for me, anyway, to see this otherwise when someone like Steve Bannon says, regarding topics like voter suppression and blanket immunity for the executive branch, "we are post-enlightenment now."  "Post-truth" used to have a progressive ring -- "we are questioning flawed master narratives like colonialism" -- but now it has anything but.  "Post-nature" used to mean gay and trans rights, not to mention women's; now it means the polar opposite plus burning the planet to a crisp.  Baby's gone like bathwater.

A trivial point perhaps, school-yard I'm-rubber-and-you're-glue repartee, but also perhaps not.  After fifty years of writing and speaking that voting doesn't matter, rights don't matter, nature isn't anything and everything is fake only, expect side effects.  Perhaps this takes the form of two or three generations who don't know how to protect basic rights and norms in any way, and have very little hope that they can or even that they should be protected.

+

Much of the far-right's recent takeover of the world, by way of short-cut through the underperforming US GOP which has now been liquidated by "the military despotism of a victorious demagogue," is ratcheted in and can never be undone.  It may even be that five degrees of warming is baked in -- "everybody dead," to quote the old Nesmith film about end-times entrepreneurship -- but it may also be that such a burn-up is not baked in.

Therefore every person trying to use any kind of agency or conscience at all has to decide: do I accept there is no chance at all, or do I act as if there is a chance on the possibility there is one?

This is what we forgot how to do, but also remembered.

+

The right wing per se controls two things most of all:  money and machines.  The rest of us have numbers, which are irrelevant in a machine process but not in the key area where humanity matters most, i.e. voice.  This means the first amendment, public sphere expression, and voting -- people, both speaking and listening, expressing and understanding, proposing and processing.

If we use this only resource we have left well, we can run circles around the machines and the money-men who control them from their bunkers and war-rooms.  If we don't, we can't.

If we only try to do more theory, "theory-theory-theory" as one might sing in a jingle, we lose.  We have to accept the mistake that was over-reliance on theory circa 1970-1990 and the bad effects it had.  We even forgot how to ask, what else is there but theory?

Rightly understood, asking this isn't even anti-theory but a true appreciation of what theory can and can't do, what it needs beyond itself, and how to work a strong and healthy balance.

+

Follow the dictionary.  Practice is one thing that differs from theory, and the right is nothing if not pragmatic.  This is tactics, but also bodies; practice can have network advantages but also network defects and friction.  Tactics can also be theorized to the point where they mean nothing to reality.  This might look like a super-strength but oh my god it is not.  Reality is real, and something we should be careful not to glide post.  (This is one of the main dots, semi-connected, of nettime '26.)

Sure don't go off half-cocked.  But consider one's missteps with some humility.  The big progressive bonanza theory promised actually delivered the opposite: a wipeout nightmare with literally no end in sight.

+

The mistake was pretty simple.  Theory in the 70's dressed itself up as a victory over Reason, that dusty old Kantian codger, but it was actually his great-great-grand-nephew in a new velour suit.  Reason means lots of vague things, being eminently spinnable and amorphous, some good some bad, but writ large it means rationality, rules, ratiocination, control-pattern, hence algorithm, law, and scriptural dominance.  Theory falsely considered itself unique, distinct from Reason, and thought by fighting on that turf it could win everything.  However it was misled, and thus both misconstrued and tried to seduce the true force to which Reason is almost always handmaiden, at least in the European West since time's first records: Authority, which means power, violence, the sword, the purse-strings and pocket-book, the carrot and the stake.  Two flies fighting over a turd, as it were.

To bounce back look at the big picture.  In the long, tragic history of Euro-Western thought the twin pillars of Reason and Authority (Chaucer called it "auctoritee") had one primary competitor, which went by the name of Experience.  This meant stuff like art and science, observation and expression, discovery and invention, people's and other living things' lives.  It kind of meant modern, but it also meant prehistoric, indigenous, and "the present," therefore it underlaid antiquity and medieval life too.  It meant both craft, or techne, and nature as in both physics and biology.  It was also generally disparaged, as we see in Brecht's play Galileo (whose motto was, as for his pater, "Experience is the teacher of all things" including music and astronomy).  Disparaged and worse.  Read Adam Fix and Pamela Smith if you don't believe me.

In Critical Inquiry, as late as 1991, experience as such was still being excoriated as antifeminist and racially suprematist, not without reason, by Joan Scott.  Yet this was too hasty a dismissal and deserves revision.  You can't stand up for women's rights if the experience of oppression is just fake like everything else.  You can't defend voting rights if democracy is bourgeois capitalist theater and nothing else.  It wasn't experience that should have been blamed but our own shabby, selfish, and (to quote Habermas) incomplete treatment of it that was to blame.  But it's always so much easier and professionally incentivized to fall back on theory.

Experience means past, present, and future instantiations, and it's anything but theoretical only.  It doesn't just mean rich white male experience, and if we accuse it of meaning that we only abandon our own and that of all other non-rich-white-males prematurely, and out of nothing more than panicky jitters (plus maybe a tinge of desperation for tenure yesterday).

+

Can experience be brought back, enough, and fast?  Yes.

Benjamin was entirely focused on it, and would have structured his whole corpus on "a critique of pure experience" as he phrased it, to build on, i.e. to modify, Kant, not flushing constitutions down the crapper, had he not been hunted to death, at the tender age of 45, by the most recent prior version of Fascism '26.  Many others who did get out, like Josef and Anni Albers, knew that a systematic denigration of experience was at the core of the Fascist plan, so they defended it the best they could as refugees.  Habermas understood its importance to Benjamin, at least partly, and might still weigh in if asked.  They might not be of giants, but we do have some shoulders to stand on.

Plus, every ordinary John and Jane Doe also have their own experience, such as it is, such as it would become, to work with and contribute through.  They can speed stuff up.  But it takes celebrities to inspire the regular people; thank goodness they have been contacted and agree.  More will be: so focus on experience.  But how?

One answer is through meditation, eastern zen or mindfulness, for starters, which is just a simple therapy for experience gone mad.  Sit and look at the pond or blade of grass.  Breathe.  It resets you, for real, and neuroscience proved it.  Celebrities understand and will echo the idea across the netosphere once they hear it; we just have to tell them about it.  Then link mindfulness, which is solid brain science, to the European tradition of dissent via the word and concept of experientia.  This gets the right's own canon on the side of reform in the most decisive kind of way, using their weight and momentum against them.  Another is that Hamilton's Federalist Papers Nos. 1 and 85, the start and finish of the work on which arguably the whole US national project is based, are obviously designed around the word Experience too.

If you can put a face to Experience per se, like a saint or spokesmodel, do that.  It creates concept neurons without which the human brain, tuned to people and faces, works very clumsily at best.  It's almost never been done, this creation of face, but can be now, this minute.  Just draw a smiley-circle with the word "experience" under it and you're done, at least with v1.x.

" exp :) "

+

As far as my own attempts to re-design Western and global thought to a sufficiently more experience-based form, I wrote a bunch of books, four since 2020 (a trilogy plus a novel).  They're not perfect by any stretch but perfection is not the need right now -- it's the attempt that is required.  I'll send you the PDF's to read to your Automated Infobot should you care to, but for my own part I'm strictly hands-off that shit.  What we need is more John Henry, less Gemini.

If it's real writing and research you want, not my amateur smorgasbord, check out Martin Jay's "Songs of Experience" from 2005 (which discusses Scott in full, I just confirmed) and "Magical Nominalism" from 2025.  He lists Montaigne, Blake, and Bataille as key examples illustrating the "performative instantiation" of Experience which we cannot do without.  And Jay was the expert nonpareil on the Frankfurt School, fully knowledgeable regarding postenlightenment poststructuralist postmodernism, and furthermore brave enough even late-career to propose a truly new view of theory itself.

Of course all the world's people have a concept of experience, and wish to peacefully connect and communicate in accord with it, so even the global economic reset and its accompanying military headaches are best approached in this way, the way of experience, which cannot be truly followed without poetry and good science.  The same cannot be said of theory.

To pre-empt the accusation of hypocrisy, or attempt to, let me add that I've personally convinced several famous experts of the above, and have started work on a major feature film with multiple global celebrities about the hypothesis.  These all might not succeed, or they might.

Therefore do not tarry, for as you sow so shall ye reap, and let the devil take the hindmost.


++++++++







-- 
# 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: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org