Re: Complexity and nostalgia

[frank . 20 . tigrero]

>> I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity"

we're not, at least nobody really is except for white supremacist trolls like 
AB, as Alice, Angela and Nina have pointed out.

Then some dude tells Angela to "chill". Pretty revolting stuff.

Agree with Angela that there should be a 100% noplatforming of fascists and tD 
and alt-right trolls. There isn't "reasoning" with them or pursuing fact as 
antidote to inbred supremacy.

Some days I really wish when this list was moderated.

Frank

- Original message -
From: Felix Stalder 
To: nettim...@kein.org
Subject:  Complexity and nostalgia 
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2018 15:10:31 +0100

I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity". If you look
at the current wave of far-right strong mean, it's seems obvious their
project is the restoration of race AND class privilege AND patriarchy.

Behind this, in my view, is a jump in social complexity (globalization,
Internet, climate crises, multipolar geopolitics etc) over the last 30
years and the inability to find forms of governance adequate to
contemporary social realities.

The neoliberal center has tried to manage this through expansion of
market forces, in the best Hayekian tradition seeing the market as the
ultimate information processor [1]. At the periphery (social as well as
geographic) this never worked particularly well and in 2008, it came
crashing down in the center as well. That created a giant nostalgia for
a less complex word which the right eagerly fills.

In my view, the call to return to a more classic class analysis also has
the whiff of such a nostalgia.

We -- lets say cultural producers of any kind -- should not give in to
this. Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.

That's not all that's needed, of course, but might be one of the ways
where culture can generate agency.


















[1] Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
American Economic Review (Sept.), 35 (4): 519–30.


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Re: Complexity and nostalgia

[Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid)]

Hi folks,

Lurker here who almost climbed into her pen after many years of silence to 
respond to A.B.s BS and then decided that he's not worth responding too - plus 
others responded so eloquently already (many thanks Alice, Ian, Florian and 
Nina for your excellent remarks!)

On a related and slightly selfish note, I've been looking for some texts that 
discuss the intersection of capitalism/patriarchy/colonialism/racism/technology 
for a reading group of artists/academics. Have read Sylvia Federici's work 
which is good but not quite satisfying. Anyone any suggestions? :-)

Cheers, Ingrid.


Sent from my HTC

- Reply message -
From: "Nina Temporär" 
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject:  Complexity and nostalgia
Date: Sun, Nov 4, 2018 00:36




Wow, nettime’s very own James Damore moment -
And hardly anyone calls him out.

I cannot believe how easily so many people here allowed A.B. to 
intellectually-click-bait
them into a discussion just because he whispered the magic words „Marx“ and 
„class“,
And willingly delivered him material to refine his language for his 
pseudo-philosophical
White male ängst-driven project,
Even after he had already lashed out in a dangerously generalized way against 
academia,
After he had already generally denounced identity politics as self-pity and 
whining, after he
Had claimed gender & race as having no social realities, after he had judged 
the welfare
State as an infantilization of society and, on top of all, had totally 
ridiculously indulged himself
In a teenage-like invention rage of cock-culture-worshipping neologisms that he 
obviously enjoys
To decorate his little short-20th-Century binary phantasy land with.

While a few of the answers with serious reactions to the classism question were 
really a
Pleasure to read and very much worth considering under different premises, I 
don’t understand
why almost nobody here (except for Alice, Ian, and Florian - thanks for your 
interventions) did see
The contradiction that the very same people he claims to be wanting to work 
with in that new class
War he dreams of, get insulted so badly and in a hierarchy-reproducing manner, 
that a future
Cooperation is being boycotted before it has even started.

Is that really only a sad lack of strategic thinking? Or not rather revealing 
how inclusive his
New class war phantasy actually is, and whose perspective he expects to be 
adopted as
Conceptual lead?

There is a big difference between disagreement and lashing out in a way that 
reveals absolute
Entitlement, and even worse: the assumption to be „safe“ when stating such 
stuff in a place
Like nettime mailing list.

It’s so tiring to be forced to point out, once more, that entitlement is key in 
this problematic:

While Alexander and his followers have very well understood that investing into 
digital literacy
Is an absolute necessity if they want to survive in these times, any knowledge 
update in relation to
Gender & anti-racism debates is shrugged of as community-specific expertise 
(and commented
With the reproach of having an only self-healing effect) instead of understood 
as the fundamental,
Constitutive (not so new) change of perspective, without which no thorough 
analysis of class
Struggle can withstand.

It was really interesting to read Dan’s report/ analysis of the beginning of 
‚identity politics‘ in the US
(In Europe, I assume, this is a slightly different story) and his 
acknowledgement/ claim that it is his
Generation's own fault not to have passed on the historic context to the next 
generation.
I would really like to engage in this discussion by asking if it is really 
about the lack of history in a
Negative sense, or, if the (assumed) lack of history/ continuity might not be 
expression of a generally
Positive phenomenon: the attitude of a generation being sick of any kind of 
further waiting and gradual
Development, legitimately bold enough to demand full acceptance here and now - 
even if this leads to
A roundhouse-kick-radicality that sometimes feels moralizing and partly unfair 
even to antecedent
activists. (And no, I am not part of that generation and often enough annoyed 
myself, but try to
Understand.)

I’m not keen of discussing it in a context, though, where Alexander Bard can 
blatantly display his near-hatred
Anger on certain minority activism without being sanctioned, just days after a 
shooting in a synagogue and
Lethal threats to critics of Trump, with daily Police brutality towards POC, 
regular attacks on homes for asylum
Seekers in Germany, harassment of anti-Trump academics in the US and similar 
harassments of academics
Criticising right-wing politics now - even structurally organised - by the AfD 
in Germany as well, and ongoing
And normalised discrimination of and assaults on women.
Incitement to violence is a spark easily ignited these days.

Last but not least, I have the impression A.B. never really had to speak up for 
himself against a main

Re: Complexity and nostalgia

[Nina Temporär]

Wow, nettime’s very own James Damore moment -
And hardly anyone calls him out.

I cannot believe how easily so many people here allowed A.B. to 
intellectually-click-bait 
them into a discussion just because he whispered the magic words „Marx“ and 
„class“,
And willingly delivered him material to refine his language for his 
pseudo-philosophical
White male ängst-driven project,
Even after he had already lashed out in a dangerously generalized way against 
academia,
After he had already generally denounced identity politics as self-pity and 
whining, after he
Had claimed gender & race as having no social realities, after he had judged 
the welfare 
State as an infantilization of society and, on top of all, had totally 
ridiculously indulged himself 
In a teenage-like invention rage of cock-culture-worshipping neologisms that he 
obviously enjoys
To decorate his little short-20th-Century binary phantasy land with.

While a few of the answers with serious reactions to the classism question were 
really a 
Pleasure to read and very much worth considering under different premises, I 
don’t understand 
why almost nobody here (except for Alice, Ian, and Florian - thanks for your 
interventions) did see 
The contradiction that the very same people he claims to be wanting to work 
with in that new class 
War he dreams of, get insulted so badly and in a hierarchy-reproducing manner, 
that a future
Cooperation is being boycotted before it has even started.

Is that really only a sad lack of strategic thinking? Or not rather revealing 
how inclusive his
New class war phantasy actually is, and whose perspective he expects to be 
adopted as
Conceptual lead? 

There is a big difference between disagreement and lashing out in a way that 
reveals absolute
Entitlement, and even worse: the assumption to be „safe“ when stating such 
stuff in a place
Like nettime mailing list.

It’s so tiring to be forced to point out, once more, that entitlement is key in 
this problematic:

While Alexander and his followers have very well understood that investing into 
digital literacy
Is an absolute necessity if they want to survive in these times, any knowledge 
update in relation to
Gender & anti-racism debates is shrugged of as community-specific expertise 
(and commented 
With the reproach of having an only self-healing effect) instead of understood 
as the fundamental,
Constitutive (not so new) change of perspective, without which no thorough 
analysis of class 
Struggle can withstand. 

It was really interesting to read Dan’s report/ analysis of the beginning of 
‚identity politics‘ in the US
(In Europe, I assume, this is a slightly different story) and his 
acknowledgement/ claim that it is his 
Generation's own fault not to have passed on the historic context to the next 
generation.
I would really like to engage in this discussion by asking if it is really 
about the lack of history in a 
Negative sense, or, if the (assumed) lack of history/ continuity might not be 
expression of a generally
Positive phenomenon: the attitude of a generation being sick of any kind of 
further waiting and gradual 
Development, legitimately bold enough to demand full acceptance here and now - 
even if this leads to 
A roundhouse-kick-radicality that sometimes feels moralizing and partly unfair 
even to antecedent
activists. (And no, I am not part of that generation and often enough annoyed 
myself, but try to 
Understand.)

I’m not keen of discussing it in a context, though, where Alexander Bard can 
blatantly display his near-hatred 
Anger on certain minority activism without being sanctioned, just days after a 
shooting in a synagogue and 
Lethal threats to critics of Trump, with daily Police brutality towards POC, 
regular attacks on homes for asylum 
Seekers in Germany, harassment of anti-Trump academics in the US and similar 
harassments of academics 
Criticising right-wing politics now - even structurally organised - by the AfD 
in Germany as well, and ongoing 
And normalised discrimination of and assaults on women.
Incitement to violence is a spark easily ignited these days.

Last but not least, I have the impression A.B. never really had to speak up for 
himself against a mainstream
Opinion, otherwise he would know how much courage it takes and that it is no 
way just 'fighting for one’s 
Own good‘ but helps numerous others affected by that norm, and that keeping 
quiet and adapting, even at 
The high price of ongoing unfair treatment, is often the easier way.

It seems to be necessary to point out that repeating just a mainstream opinion, 
once it is tumbling and 
Forced to open up to multi-perspective views, does  n o t  count as such.

Best, N
Ps: Alice and Ian, your mails arrived while I wrote this, thanks again


> Am 03.11.2018 um 18:30 schrieb Brian Holmes :

> On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 7:11 AM Felix Stalder  > wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 3, 2018, 6:07 AM Alexander Bard   wrote:
> 

#  

Re: Complexity and nostalgia

[Brian Holmes]

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 7:11 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:

>  Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
> esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
> complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
> or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
> multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
> into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.


This is totally persuasive to me, and it's what I have been doing since
2008. However the uptake of such efforts appears somewhat low.

The corporate Internet has been one massive effort to deal with complexity,
essentially by individualizing it, in order to streamline the bureaucratic
aspects of life and reduce the daunting challenge of consumer choice. Web
2.0 has largely exhausted the population and left little energy for
progressive networked media. The most common nostalgia is not for class
consciousness but for a free afternoon with no bells and whistles of any
kind.

I am curious about specific projects and/or social trends that go in the
direction you suggest, Felix. Say more.

Identity politics is definitely not something we can abandon in the US.
That would leave only corporate liberalism and national populism. But
identity politics as developed so far is not capable of articulating the
multiplicity of positions in society, which is what liberalism used to do
relatively better than any other form of really existing governance. Obama
represents the pinnacle and decline of liberalism's capacity to manage
social complexity through government. As for market forces, they have
failed tragically, as the election of Bolsonaro by WhatsApp proves if you
didn't already know.

So, Felix, you have stated the problem pretty well. Let's really go further
with this one. In current identity politics, translating one set of
explicity experiences into another one is called intersectionality, it's
the contemporary rejoinder to class consciousness and surely represents a
giant evolutionary step beyond that old Lukacsian relic. In an imperial and
soon, post-imperial US context, it seems to me that the types of coalitions
that can be knitted together through intersectionality need to be extended,
augmented and/or relayed by other communication processes and other
aesthetics too, in order to deal with the sprawling issues of politic
economy and political ecology, which just keep spinning further out of
control.

The US isn't the only context. The partial breakdown of the EU is a pretty
serious failure to manage complexity. Other regions face still other
versions of this problem. Let's talk about it.

best, Brian
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Re: Complexity and nostalgia

[Alice Yang]

I cannot believe (but can believe) that the discussion has become a typical one 
of ~Millennials and Gen Z need to grow up already!~ Alexander, your claim that 
the class oppressed need to study white male academics whose works are only 
kept in circulation by an echo chamber of elitism such as Hegel and Freud is 
bewildering.

I’m in favor of the questions Dan posed. We need to redefine class as not 
separate from race and gender but another component of belief entangled with 
it. 

The revolution isn’t the redistribution of resources (land, money, women) for 
reownership but the realization of their condition of ownership by the objects 
themselves (climate change, decolonization, feminism).

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 3, 2018, at 10:10 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity". If you look
> at the current wave of far-right strong mean, it's seems obvious their
> project is the restoration of race AND class privilege AND patriarchy.
> 
> Behind this, in my view, is a jump in social complexity (globalization,
> Internet, climate crises, multipolar geopolitics etc) over the last 30
> years and the inability to find forms of governance adequate to
> contemporary social realities.
> 
> The neoliberal center has tried to manage this through expansion of
> market forces, in the best Hayekian tradition seeing the market as the
> ultimate information processor [1]. At the periphery (social as well as
> geographic) this never worked particularly well and in 2008, it came
> crashing down in the center as well. That created a giant nostalgia for
> a less complex word which the right eagerly fills.
> 
> In my view, the call to return to a more classic class analysis also has
> the whiff of such a nostalgia.
> 
> We -- lets say cultural producers of any kind -- should not give in to
> this. Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
> esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
> complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
> or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
> multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
> into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.
> 
> That's not all that's needed, of course, but might be one of the ways
> where culture can generate agency.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [1] Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
> American Economic Review (Sept.), 35 (4): 519–30.
> 
> 
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> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
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Complexity and nostalgia

[Felix Stalder]

I cannot believe we are still debating "class vs. identity". If you look
at the current wave of far-right strong mean, it's seems obvious their
project is the restoration of race AND class privilege AND patriarchy.

Behind this, in my view, is a jump in social complexity (globalization,
Internet, climate crises, multipolar geopolitics etc) over the last 30
years and the inability to find forms of governance adequate to
contemporary social realities.

The neoliberal center has tried to manage this through expansion of
market forces, in the best Hayekian tradition seeing the market as the
ultimate information processor [1]. At the periphery (social as well as
geographic) this never worked particularly well and in 2008, it came
crashing down in the center as well. That created a giant nostalgia for
a less complex word which the right eagerly fills.

In my view, the call to return to a more classic class analysis also has
the whiff of such a nostalgia.

We -- lets say cultural producers of any kind -- should not give in to
this. Our task, in my view, is to develop new languages, and new
esthetics, to account for, and deal with, the sharply increased
complexity. That means, that there is no single privileged point-of-view
or layer of analysis. If there is any strength, it will come out of
multiplicity, out of ways of translating one set of explicit experiences
into another one, showing that how and why resonate with each other.

That's not all that's needed, of course, but might be one of the ways
where culture can generate agency.


















[1] Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society,”
American Economic Review (Sept.), 35 (4): 519–30.




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