Sean wrote. engineering as management is what got us into this mess..
Exactly. Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer Or a free lunch, which doesn’t exist either. Reciprocity is a better term, and the family of concepts around it: the commons, the social, a new socialism that embraces the non-human. My mother used to tell us to show some consideration - a basic decency that includes a way of living right and a principle of conviviality at the scale of cosmopolitan politics. Very good suggestion. Patrick Lichty website: http:://www.patricklichty.com email: v...@voyd.com instagram, twitter: @patlichty From: <nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Sean Cubitt <sean.cub...@unimelb.edu.au> Date: Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 5:41 PM To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" <nettime-l@mail.kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism thanks for getting to the numb of it Brian tho personally I'd cry off assembling democracy and freedom into a single object: democracy may well need a separate critique but the ideological seizure of 'freedom' has made it a dangerous word in need of critique - and better still alternatives and I'm a little nervous of earth-system science which has all the marks of the technological solution road that has become a major tool to replace climate change denial with the promise of technological solutions (and jam) tomorrow: Crutzen and Stoermer ended their paper introducing the term Anthropocene had a similar call: 'An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management' - and it is management that is the real outcome of claims of freedom - engineering as management is what got us into this mess, and with the profit motive so much in the ascendant, the chances of a system reliant on for-profit corporations – that failed utterly to make Luisiana sustainable after Katrina – being able to resolve planetary catastrophe are minimal. Reciprocity is a better term, and the family of concepts around it: the commons, the social, a new socialism that embraces the non-human. My mother used to tell us to show some consideration - a basic decency that includes a way of living right and a principle of conviviality at the scale of cosmopolitan politics. The first step is to recognise the commonwealth of citizens, a democratic principle under attack; the second to recognise migrants as citizens - a step that the political parties of the wealthy have weaponised (Fortress Europe, trumpty-dumpty's Wall, the 'Pacific solution' which is neither of a solution or pacific). If - - and it's a big 'if' -- it is possible to actualise the actually existing demos politically, then democracy might thrive - but in a very different form. If -- and this is the biggest if -- it can become possible to recognise that there is a continuum between demos and ecology (to recall that fundamental feminist slogan Our Bodies Ourselves) - we may begin to build a demos that is truly social, common, like common sense, what Marx called the general intellect, but which has obviously been poisoned at the source when there is, as reported today, a rush of overdoses of horse-wormer in Oklahoma The first victim of war is truth; the first victim of Fox-Q totalitarianism is common sense Politics beyond sustainability, beyond maintaining capital at all costs, which is to say at the cost of everything requires consideration and the sense of the commons, common sense. Sitting on a wall, as every child knows, comes before a fall Releasing common sense of this basic kind will not be easy but may perhaps make possible a future other than the perpetuity of debt, pandemic and climate fatalism which are the realities underpinning the consumer discipline of free will, free choice, free speech defined by the free market. Common sense says the world wants to be free as in free beer Seán Cubitt | He/Him Professor of Screen Studies School of Culture and Communication W104 John Medley Building University of Melbourne Grattan Street Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA scub...@unimelb.edu.au New Book: Anecdotal Evidence https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au# Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org> on behalf of nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org> Sent: Saturday, 4 September 2021 8:00 PM To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org> Subject: nettime-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 3 Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to nettime-l@mail.kein.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/HwY4CMwvygsqYq8joCwv6Mp?domain=mx.kein.org or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org You can reach the person managing the list at nettime-l-ow...@mail.kein.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism (Brian Holmes) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:12:56 -0500 From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" <nettime-l@mail.kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism Message-ID: <CANuiTgx1CR-rjRWub1WmA2bwff=vqbm44aat-kmvazdh33c...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy" must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not. Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains, rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere (not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others immediately show up yelling about their freedom. In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant expression of decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom last January 6. The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does, you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the most well-off members of society. The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary analysis of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. Stiegler was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho. Brian On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann <a...@mikro.in-berlin.de> wrote: > please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)". > > -a > > ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet > other proportions. > > pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and > might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like > "precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses. > > > Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt: > > thanks for circulating Patrice > > > > there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka > > Stiegler?s translator): > > > > > https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/BXywCNLwzjF0p0xonC42fUA?domain=mscp.org.au > > < > https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/BXywCNLwzjF0p0xonC42fUA?domain=mscp.org.au > > > > > > > > a flavour: > > "Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is > > associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which > > we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency > > depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a > > necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and > > political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of > > collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is > > always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental > > requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the > > /absolute/ failure of the West over the past two years means that these > > ideas must /absolutely/ be subjected to critique, where the latter is > > /never/ a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ?pharmacological? > > limits" > > > > se?n > # 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: > https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/HwY4CMwvygsqYq8joCwv6Mp?domain=mx.kein.org > # archive: > https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/h47zCOMxAkspkpX3PukoAL_?domain=nettime.org > contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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