Thanks Gary,
for critically pulling me up on an un-problemtized use of a variety of liberal
bromides. Particularly telling is your last point about the danger of
unwittingly putting myself at odds with the legitimate rage of oppressed groups
whose tactics have been pilloried by both liberals and the right under the
generalised rubric of "cancel culture". I am sorry Alice Yang you are
absolutely right I accept I was not paying enough attention to the context and
struggles within which term is used and mis-used. (including the Harpers
Magazine letter)
Best
David
David,
Thanks for your post on William Davies’s recent contributions to the London
Review of Books. Enjoyed it.
The mention of Carl Schmitt brings to mind another critic of liberalism,
Chantal Mouffe, and her philosophy of hegemony and antagonism, itself greatly
influenced by Schmitt’s account of the friend/enemy relation. For Mouffe, the
political is a decision that is always ‘taken in an undecidable terrain’. This
is because social relations are not fixed or natural, but rather the product of
hegemonic articulations: that is, of contingent yet temporary decisions
involving power and conflict. (Which has the advantage that these hegemonic
articulations can be disarticulated, transformed and rearticulated as a result
of struggle between opponents.)
Now, I realize this may seem a rather counter-intuitive question to ask -
particularly for readers of the London Review of Books! But I do worry, is
there a risk that using terms and concepts like ‘argument’, ‘careful
judgement’, ‘knowledge’, ‘democracy’, ‘public’ as datum points in this way is
itself a form of affective politics that ‘“precedes debate, precedes argument,
precedes speech”’? Might it, too, be a ‘decisionism’, “an acting out or
performance of some prior act of identification”’ - one in which the question
of what it is to be political, especially in relation to ‘cancel culture’, is
not taken in an undecidable terrain, but is rather decided in advance of
intellectual questioning?
Here’s a less subtle (and less philosophical) version of the concern that’s
troubling me and that I'm not expressing as well as I'd like: How do we as ‘net
critics’ avoid coming across - especially to certain of those progressive or
marginalized voices who may have found themselves associated with cancel
culture - as merely activist/artist/geek versions of the liberal signatories to
the Letter on Justice and Open Debate that appeared in Harper’s Magazine at the
beginning of July and that Geert also refers to in his piece on cancel culture?
Cheers, Gary
# 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: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
