On 28 Feb 2016, at 23:29, Brian Holmes wrote:
Those are my thoughts,
Really great.
What follows is more chiming in than replying to you per se, Brian.
Though I do want to amplify one thing you said:
You know, by simple math of wealth and access, I'm of the privileged.
But I'm frankly afraid of the liberal future which is becoming equal
to the authoritarian one. Intellectuals should help imagine, plan,
test and build a different present, on all levels from technics to
ethics to affects and back again. It takes some theory and a whole lot
more.
-- in particular a much wider range of experiences and views. If
sunlight is the best disinfectant, diversity (multiplicity,
polyvocality, call it what you like) is the best fertilizer. I'm happy
this discussion is happening on nettime, and I'd be even happier if we
had a wider range of people chiming in. I'm pretty sure a few people
around here have some experience with authoritarianism in everyday life.
That said...
'The left' (or whatever you want to call it) hasn't responded to this
authoritarian turn very effectively, or even just to its
retro-turbo-fascist symptoms. That's not surprising, really. The key
institution the left relies on at almost every point -- the university
-- has proven itself more adept at capturing and taming its various
constituencies with endless administrativia, compliance, job security
anxieties, and debt. If those dysfunctions were the price we paid for
some really compelling product, we could overlook them. But the norms of
the 'academic' dissemination of ideas guarantee that it'll continue on
its trajectory of becoming increasingly irrelevant: the credentialism
more exclusive, the publications more impenetrable, the facilities less
accessible -- the very opposite of compelling.
But if we look at that same cluster of problems at a smaller scale, as
Patrice suggests, we'll see good things for the most part: deeply
social, personal engagements that shape individuals intellectually and
emotionally, the shifting tides of communities of inquiry, and
undeniable advances in the complexity, richness, and intimacy of thought
and practice -- the kinds of things leftists tend to value. But when we
try to survey this field more systemically, what we see looks more like
a catastrophic wasteland: an endless expanse of sentimentality,
idiosyncratic positions and relations, writings that no one will ever
read, projects abandoned then forgotten, events recorded on the wind,
and above all frustrated aspirations.
It's easy to look at that and say, "Well, the left needs to improve its
ability to operate at a large scale"-- and that's true to a limited
extent. But the left needs to recognize that there's a reason it sucks
at large scales: functioning and acting at a large scale is antithetical
to most things the left values. But why is that? Why would different
political tendencies be asymmetrical in their ability to operate at
different scales? Well, a better question is why would anyone think that
disparate tendencies would or should have symmetrical or equivalent
abilities? Why would political tendencies that embrace persuasion and
consensus be as effective at any 'scale' -- and there are many kinds of
scales -- as tendencies that embrace violence and coercion? And why
would political tendencies that reject the accumulation of wealth be as
effective in any context as tendencies that fetishize it? They won't be.
'Scale' presupposes wealth, and wealth presupposes coercion. That's why
leftist proposals about scaling often sound ridiculous -- sure, as soon
as we're done with 'our own big data projects' we can start on 'our own
antiballistic missile systems' and 'our own pharmaceuticals.'
But why talk about left and right when this thread began with Brian's
forward about *authoritarianism*? Well, for starters our vocabulary for
discussing authoritarianism barely exists -- which is why Geert had to
jump directly to Reich, de Mause, and Theweleit, even at the risk of
disturbing the ghosts of therapy for the masses. It's not surprising
that we'd find ourselves in this situation. Seriously, how much
'establishment' support should we expect for a kind of analysis that
waved away the fundamental distinction of the Cold War, capitalism vs
communism, to focus on what they have in common? And the same goes, in
different ways, for sources of support from the 'alternatives': radicals
of every stripe, from the ludicrous to the pragmatic, have had their own
reasons for discouraging analyses that would emphasize what their
movements had in common with the establishment(s). So we need to talk
about left and right -- not because they're valuable categories in
themselves, but because they've served as proxies (masks, really) for
efforts to grapple with authoritarianism.
But we also need to look for analyses that are independent of the
(counter)therapeutic tradition Geert mentioned. In my view, one useful
tool comes from Bakhtin, the Russian (or Soviet, if you like) literary
historian and theorist -- specifically, his idea of dialogic vs
monologic. I'll do a bit of violence to his work by adding some pop
Nietzscheo-Kierkegaardian rubbish, but for those who haven't spent
any/much time with it, Bakhtin laid out these two terms as a way to
understand a fundamental conflict in literature -- with political
implications that seem plainly clear for speech.
The dialogic is an environmental form of language that emphasizes a
multiplicity of voices and tends toward the comic: a sort of 'acoustic'
space in which individual invention is almost impossible to identify
amidst the noise of babble, echo, and laughter in its deepest forms,
irony and parody (as opposed to mockery, which is laughter in the
service of aggression). In this kind of linguistic environment, meanings
are multiple and mutable, so they tend to dissolve boundaries of almost
every kind, including the boundaries of the self. When you apply this
kind of logic to social and political entities -- say, by asking where
would we find it or what would it look like? -- I don't think it's
surprising we'd find it aligned with the multiplication of new kinds of
selves, the generative uses of social divisions, the celebration of
hybridity and gradation -- for example, in form like multi-ethnicity, or
the transformation of 'sexual' distinction into less determinate, more
creative preferential tendencies.
In contrast to this, there's the monologic, which insists on a tragic
singularity and identity of thought, voice, and meaning. The result is a
violent positivism in which idea = utterance = object. It aims to be the
first and last word, with no echo that might hint at the erosion of
meaning. It leaves as little room as possible -- preferably none at all
-- for ambiguity, uncertainty, doubt, skepticism, or even
circumspection. It's easy to see, I think, how this tendency would
appeal not just to military institutions but also to particular kinds of
religion (evangelical on the one hand and reactionary on the other), for
example. And why it would lend itself to nostalgist tendencies (dead men
don't talk back) while aligning itself against the emergence and
legitimation of new kinds of subjectivity (who *do* talk back). And how
*it would draw many disparate traditions together* into effective,
executive, and instrumental political formations.
In my view, there's no better tool for understanding the fundamental
asymmetry of left and right -- and, in this context, how those woolly
terms would come to serve as proxies for varying degrees of
authoritarianism. And I don't just mean on the primary level of a
mapping in which left = dialogic and right = monologic (which is too
blunt but pretty effective). I also mean a way of explaining why leftist
efforts to mimic rightist activities and institutions are often doomed
-- to betray their principles, to sell out, to become hollow-sounding,
to be appropriated by institutions in ways that are both completely
cynical *and* completely naive.
Cheers,
T
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