Brian at his best, thank you so much for this! Best,
Seb > On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder <fe...@openflows.com > <mailto:fe...@openflows.com>> wrote: > I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington > on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty > clear that this event was made on, through and for social media.... > [...lots of other very cogent observations here...] > I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing. > > It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation. > > In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, > yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I > had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this. > > The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the world > of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we left behind > the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in political > theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing from Senator > Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical playbook > developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the play-acting > devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid and very > obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the highest > powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and print > journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live rallies. The > theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a choice between > conflicting realities could finally occur. > > Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there was > no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the uprising > also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for collective > violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an inchoate, yet > very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and delusional. Sure, we had > seen these folks already, many times. Yet this time there was no equivocation > as to who was leading. When Pence and McConnell took their last-minute stand > in favor of the Constitution, Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with > their actions, Trump's people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally > lanced the boil of Trumpism. > > When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and San > Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate change > was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol, it > became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated insurrectionary > rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown. > > Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would be > realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social fact." > The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in which > the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the charismatic or > magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic ritual with all the > density, complexity and precarity of lived experience. It is a real force > because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It is a total fact > because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a society's core > affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is and how it works. > > The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm the > peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically, was a > challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures, values and > aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy. This was not > a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though that was what > everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was dynamic, > open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what it actually > did. > > It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had > occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this > way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to actually > legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and the Senate. > Not just Trump, but three decades of Republican mendacity and opportunism > were pushed aside. And that event did not merely happen over social media, or > on talk radio, or on the Hannity show. It was not just another piece of > calculated political theater. It was a society-wide event: a total social > fact. > > Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something extremely > interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his communications > for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant step towards > accepting their integration in the overall political process. > > So we dodged a bullet yesterday, for sure. And something a lot more important > may potentially have happened. > > There comes a point where you have to be counter-factual, you have to engage > in what Mauss calls "magical thinking." You have to take a role in a theater > that really does have consequences. That tipping-point is now. I will > participate in the collective actions of a society that starts to reverse the > tremendous harms it has been committing for decades and centuries. I will > help to transform the pragmatic administration of social functions. > > all the best, Brian > > > > > > > > -- > | |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com <http://felix.openflows.com/> > | > | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt > <http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt> | > > # 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 > <http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l> > # archive: http://www.nettime.org <http://www.nettime.org/> contact: > nett...@kein.org <mailto:nett...@kein.org> > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > # 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:
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