On 01/11/2015 10:55 AM, [email protected] wrote:
A Bayesian would probably bet against the future of Democracy in Europe
by now. Especially given the fact there is such a strong prior.
But what's to be done as a Marxist, in the broadest possible sense?
Critique, for sure (the "full recognition of the quagmire"). But a
revolution in Europe (or at least a "real political turn")? Not
everything that is hard to imagine can be ruled out, especially if you're
able to influence the outcome yourself. But my feeling is that our era's
reasoning has long become Bayesian, and that it has become harder to
insist on demanding the impossible.
Sebastian, your post is thoughtful and bitterly incisive. I think we
kind of understand each other. I would like to up the ante a little.
"Demanding the impossible," "storming heaven" and that kind of rhetoric
is, in my view, exactly what has produced the Joschka Fischers of the
world, who fall from the heights of utopia into total identification
with the eternal and untouchable status quo. In fact they have moved
from one form of denialism to another.
You're right, present-day normative establishment thinking is thoroughly
probabilistic. It's based on regression analysis, which means
establishing the trajectory of some dependent variable within previous
statistical records, then extrapolating forward into the future. Like
any real event (9-11 for instance), the financial crash of 2008
represents a breakdown of this system. It's a particularly significant
breakdown because contemporary computerized finance, which has become
the leading technology of global governance, is founded entirely on
regression analysis.
To "demand the impossible" is to ask, rightly, for a break in the
predictable. It's the strategy of the critical utopia. What I'm saying
is that the break is already here. You don't have to ask for it but just
struggle to perceive it against the grain. It is the triple crisis of
the present, which has been produced by thirty years of neoliberal
informationalism:
- First, democratic citizenship in the former first world countries has
broken under the pressure of inequality, resulting (among others) in the
political fracture of the EU between north and south.
- Second, the Trilateral world order has split apart into a chaotically
evolving multipolar complex (which at this point, and not only because
of phenomena like ISIS, cannot even be called a "system").
- Third, the planetary ecology has entered a process of rapid
metamorphosis due to the tremendous new injection of atmospheric carbon
that followed the 1990s boom.
All of us who became globally conscious through the use of the Internet
demanded the impossible. We demanded to consume the world in a flash of
electricity. Or rather we responded, each with our own forms of
resistance, to an injunction far more powerful than ourselves, and we
participated in this world-consuming process.
In my post I wanted to say two things. First, there is now a real threat
of full-scale war in the chaotic multipolar power complex (a threat that
is being lived out as a kind of anticipatory simulacrum in France right
now, with thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets). Second, this
dramatic rehearsal for war risks entirely diverting our collective
political attention from the accelerating process of climate change that
now constitutes our human horizon, in every sense of that last word.
Meanwhile, on the ground, very close to us, the rupture in continuity
that explodes every norm of the neoliberal world has already happened.
It's the breakdown of egalitarian citizenship. This is the third thing,
the absence of democracy, the gaping hole. Undoubtedly, for those of us
who restlessly consume the world, it is the fundamental locus of our own
situated blindness. In the EU, this largely silent drama has been given
a face by the egalitarian mobilizations of Greece and of Spain, where,
as Eric rightly points out, political experiments are underway and are
struggling to reach a European stage.
In my view, the issue is not about demanding the impossible. It's about
finding ways to participate in the massive ruptures of probablity that
define the present as the tangibly uncertain, the open horizon. To
participate, for an intellectual, is to analyze and express the current
situation, not on the basis of predictions, but on the basis of changes
that are already underway. And that's not apocalyptic thinking, to
respond to some objections that David Garcia has thoughtfully made.
Disaster, as Blanchot once tried to point out, is when the stars ("les
astres") fall down to earth, and you can actually touch your own destiny.
Unfortunately, the figures of an ancient religious conflict or clash of
civilizations have been effective at closing this human horizon, and
transforming or restranscendentalizing the experience of our mortality
into something eternal and untouchable that can be securitized by the
army. I guess that in your terms, Sebastian, this would be the last
stand of the Bayesians. I don't think it's going to last very long,
actually.
thanks for your post, Brian
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