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: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
