nettime Why I say the things I say
On 05/05/2012 01:56 PM, Nicholas Knouf wrote: How does one take a principled stand against the repugnant policies of the Koch Bros., while also holding out the possibility that their philanthropic actions just_might_ cause some positive change in the world? I reckon it's close to impossible. The reason why is that by continuing to admire, in whatever way, the oligarchs of your country or any other, and by refusing to condemn them and the people who support them, one sits on the fence and thereby encourages everyone else to do exactly the same. How to oppose the oligarchy without frankly opposing them? How to be part of and against the ruling class? This has ever been the dilemma of the so-called middle classes, those who mediate between the rulers and the ruled. It is not an easy position when one springs from those middle classes, because as you point out, Nick, our culture, our very subjectivity, is largely given to us by the gifts of the rulers. Only by some deliberate effort can the middle-class person actually break out of this position of admiration, this inarticulate belief that the rulers are somehow the good people. The great resource whereby the rulers have always legitimated the iniquity of their rule has always been art, culture, philanthropy. Should one be suspicious of those things? Is the culture of the rich a double-edged sword? What does it mean to be cut by it? To rule is not simply to bestow gifts on the less enlightened. It is to extort one's wealth and power by means of violence both physical and psychic. And in the case of oil magnates, it is to participate in military imperialism, to support war and to damage the environment irreparably. The case of the Koch brothers is surely the most explicit in this regard. I recall, for those who would somehow not know, that the Koch brothers are in the oil business; that they founded the libertarian Cato institute which has served as an ideological arm of corporate neoliberalism; paid out more to their political action committee between 2006 and 2010 than any other oil industry including Exxon-Mobile; and have backed since its inception the one organization that has done more than any other to support the Tea Party, namely Americans for Prosperity, which is also pushing climate-change denial. Well, I could go on, but anyone who has not done a minimum of reading about the Koch brothers simply should do so. I will put a few links below, but I think everyone already knows these things. Under the rule of oligarchs like the Kochs, the US has led the world in the transformation from public cultural funding to private. So isn't it nice, they pay for your museums. At present this structural transformation is overtaking Europe and other regions under the pressures of austerity, which arise from the very libertarian philosophy promoted by the Koch brothers and so many other corporate billionaires defending their class power. The transformation extends to the formerly public universities, which are now debt-traps for unwitting human prey. The transformation of the formerly public institutions is documented quite well in books such as Academic Capitalism, Unmaking the Public University, and many others which I cite in my text Silence=Debt. When this transformation is complete, you will indeed have something like the Carnegie Libraries on which to nourish your subjectivity. You'll have the Met, Harvard, the MoMA, a militarized and corporatized UC Berkeley, etc. What you will not have are self-governing institutions maintaining a sense of responsibility both to the internal ethics of intellectual disciplines, and to broader regulative ideals of equality. That is to say, what you won't have is any pretence of a democratic society. The tacit requirement for crossing the threshholds of these institutions will be to bow down before the godlike figures who created them. I am not sure how to exit from this situation where we middle-class people are dominated while serving also as the vectors and relays of domination. I know it's a fact, because I have seen conditions in both the US and Western Europe degrade over my lifetime, particularly the US, where the existence of what's called the oligarchy or the ruling class is now a reality so patent, so statistically evident, that it is simply undeniable. And yet people accept it, they internalize the competitive, winner-take-all values of the oligarchy, just as they have followed the lead of the oligarchy in increasingly denying the existence of human-induced climate change. Trusting that this rule of the oligarchs just might create something culturally positive - that's naive, Nick. While you're trusting, or even merely speculating on the possibility, we are headed toward the complete disempowerment of our democracy by billionaire Political Action Committees. One more step and and naivete becomes complicity. Which is the usual fate of the middle classes. Help me out, everyone or anyone, if you are
Re: nettime The insult of the 1 percent: Art-history majors
Hi, more semantic analysis I know this began as an anarchist mailing list but let's be honest about power and its sources, okay? Apart from the fact that I doubt that nettime ever was anarchist in any clear-cut way, although it always had an anarchistic streak, I find that phrase 'let's be honest' highly problematic and just like 'complex' it serves a certain purpose of cutting discussions short. Should we 'be honest' and agree that there was never such a thing as leftist politics? Even in the USA, Mr. Stahlman, there were powerful mass movements of workers and intellectuals who faced down the elites and forced them to make serious concessions. Even today many types of struggles where new types of 'mass intellectuiality' are pitched against elite rule are going on, and to my eyes, are even greatly intensifying at this very moment. So 'let's be honest' there has been maybe always a tendency of the elites trying to rule completely unchallenged, yet lets work to not allow them to get there, because actually they are quaking in their boots ;-) venceremos Armin # 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 Wisconsin Report: hotly contested, no legitimacy at stake
Dear Nettime: While the rest of the American left was out on May Day celebrating, trying to make something happen, or block business as usual, Occupy Madison marked the day by quietly closing down the encampment they¹d held for months. The fact that this development meant practically nothing to the Wisconsin movement speaks volumes about the different political space traveled by the Wisconsin Uprising at this moment, compared to the national Occupy movement. It is not Occupy that is on the mind of Wisconsinites, but rather the upcoming Wisconsin recall election targeting governor Scott Walker and several others. The election, set for June 5, 2012, only about six weeks from now, was forced by overwhelming petition. Before then, the Democratic and Republican candidates will be winnowed down to one nominee from each party by a primary election set for May 8, this coming Tuesday. May Day it is not. But unlike the May Day protests, actions, symbolism, and demonstrationswhose sound and fury, let¹s face it, are pretty easily tuned out by the mainstream (and not just media, but actual people, by the tens of millions)the consequences of this election will be felt concretely by everyone in Wisconsin, activist or not, and for way longer than the news cycle of a single day. Hundreds of thousands in Wisconsinprobably even millionswill feel the effects of this election directly in the measurable forms of a reduced paycheck, a lost job, a health problem that leads to financial ruin, an unmanageable classroom, and twenty other big things. Furthermore, the consequences will ripple out nationally, either to draw a line on austerity attacks or to green light the regressive austerity agenda. It has been said by Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and countless radicals that if elections mattered, they would be made illegal. Well, through their various voter suppression efforts, the Wisconsin GOP has been trying to do exactly thatmake voting difficult and legally restricted. This election matters and they know it. But the movement grassroots has not grasped yet the meaning of the election. We must discuss this, if the movement is to have any hope of effectively continuing beyond the advertised finality of the recall election. This is my attempt to think through how the movement needs to interpret the election if the Uprising is to remain relevant, powerful, and strategically ready on the morning of June 6, no matter who wins or loses. Is this election of any significance to people outside of Wisconsin? For the labor movement a Walker victory would be a national disaster. For the regressive Republicans, a Walker defeat would be a repudiation with national resonance. So yes, but differently. * Wisconsin has an open primary, meaning anybody of any party affiliation or non-affiliation can vote for any of the candidates. Conservatives can vote for a Democratic candidate and progressives can vote for a Republican. An open primary removes the exclusivity of an official party-identified electorate, which is good. At the same time, the open primary assures an element of cynicism through tactical voting and bad-faith candidacies. For example, right now the Republicans are running several candidates in Democratic primaries without a shred of pretense that they are anything other than electoral hurdles and tactical disruptions. In the case of some or maybe even all of the ³fake² Democrats, there is hardly anything dishonest about them. For example, the Senate Majority Leader of the Wisconsin state senate is Scott Fitzgerald, and he is facing a recall election of his own (also June 5). In order to force the Democratic challenger, Lori Compas, into spending resources on a primary election, regressive Republican activist Gary Ellerman is running as a Democrat. If it weren¹t for him, Compas would not have to compete in a primary at all. This helps Fitzgerald by taking the fight to the Democratic primary election, which, if enough Republicans vote in it, theoretically could be won by Ellerman. Then he simply runs a concessionary campaign for the recall election and hands a victory to his buddy Fitzgerald. So Compas must win the primary. This tactic was used back in the summer of 2011 against some of the Democratic state senators facing recall. It has not been actually successful, not to the point of actually undermining a good-faith candidate. Not yet. But this time the Republicans are trying harder, and I heard some rumor about Tea Partiers pledging to vote in the Democratic primaries. The tricky part comes with the rule that however one chooses to vote in the primary, a voter only gets one vote. So if conservatives spend their vote on a bad-faith Democrat, then they leave the Republican side open for progressive voters to do the same thing to them. Democrats, unsurprisingly, are not aggressively taking the opportunity to generate havoc for the Republicans by running bad-faith candidates, somehow being content to leave the Republican
nettime A Tribute to Ken Livingstone (Left Futures)
from Michael Edwards: You will probably all know (while now we wait for crucial Greek, French etc elections) that we had some local elections in UK this week. The conservative and 'liberal-democrat' parties which make up the current national coalition government did very badly, Labour (even though also largely following a neo-liberal / austerity line) did well. Greens had a very good support (by UK standards) and the far right BNP almost disappeared. Turnouts low. Still feels post-political. In London our dreadful mayor Boris Johnson managed to get re-elected by a small margin which is bad. The best news is that Jenny Jones, the Green, came third after Ken Livingstone and ahead of the once-significant liberal-democrats. The Assembly has a bit more labour in it, the same 2 greens and fewer conservatives. Just delivered by Twitter is what I consider a very nice comment on the positive strands in Ken Livingstone's career. A lot of us have been very critical of Ken in the last decade so it's salutary to be reminded of what a huge positive impact he had... Michael Original to: http://www.leftfutures.org/2012/05/a-tribute-to-ken/ bwo Inura list/ Michael Edwards A tribute to Ken Enoch Powell (who thanks to a recent revelation and in part to Ken may now be described as a onetime member of the LGBT community) said all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure. Kens career may have ended in defeat yesterday, but it was no failure. Before anything else is said, Ken deserves a tribute. Indeed he deserves more tributes than he will get from his fellow members of the Labour Party, but of that we shall say more anon. He will remain a giant of London politics long after most people stop remembering that there used to be a Mayor Johnson. He has been a major national political figure since 1981. How many national political figures from 1981 could have even contemplated holding a major political office until 2016? None. Kens greatest contribution to British politics was to take unpopular causes, notably issues of race, sexism, and homophobia, take actions and implement policies which made a difference to significant minorities, and over time see those causes taken into the mainstream of British politics, by the Tories as well as New Labour. Back in the 1980s, however, Ken was vilified for raising them by Thatchers government, by almost the entire media, and by most people in his own party, including many on the more traditional Left and in the trade unions. If Thatcher had not decided to abolish the GLC, perhaps Kens carer would have ended sooner and Britain might have been a very different place today. Following the Brixton riots in the summer of 1981, Ken had no choice but to take action on race but his approach was very different from that advocated by others. Lord Scarmans report into the riots, though recognising racial disadvantage and racial discrimination as underlying causes, argued that institutional racism did not exist. Eighteen years after Scarman, the Macpherson Report, an investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, concluded that the police force was institutionally racist, vindicating Kens approach. Under Kens leadership (he chaired the GLC Ethnic Minorities committee personally), the GLC consulted with black and other minority ethnic communities, drew up equal opportunities policies, employed race relations advisers, and sought to empower diverse communities by awarding millions of pounds in grants. Kens approach broke with the prevailing assumption of assimilation as the core objective, redefining anti-racism as the promotion of the right to be different, the encouragement of diversity. Under New Labour, this multiculturalism became the new British orthodoxy and, thanks largely to Ken, is at the heart of Londons identity. The experience with gender equality was similar. Kens policies achieved real change in practice amongst the GLCs large workforce. In 1981, no women or black people in the GLC Supplies department, for example, where they made up the bulk of the staff, had ever reached even middle management. The Fire Brigade had only six black staff out of 6,500. That changed radically. In the provision of services too, there was institutional racism. Only 2% of GLC housing lettings went to non-whites in 1981. For these policies, Ken was hounded by the Sun, the Mail and the Standard but that vilification reached a new depth with the involvement of the GLC in challenging homophobia, notably through its grant-funding. The Blairites who now seem to dominate LGBT Labour could do more to recognise the role played by a heterosexual man who carried on making the speeches hed been making for years about lesbian and gay rights after he became Leader of the GLC several years before Chris Smith became the first MP to come out. In London politics, there is much for which Ken will be remembered of what he did and more
Re: nettime Why I say the things I say
This whole chain is increasingly silly. Because while Brian and others complain about things like... When people start defending the Koch borthers, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or privatized universities and museums because they're excellent and they have such good art, I admit it, I sometimes freak out: I think I'm be hearing the ventriloquized voice of the enemy. And write other things like: Translation: At some point, you gotta say to those around you: Stop defending the rulers for their poison gifts. Start attacking them because they are a clear and present danger. And still other people complain that using the word complex is some kind of intellectual trickery... Well, by my count a significant portion of the people on this list seem to work in or for those privatized universities. It's the radicalism of the keyboard you're practicing. Oh, go ahead, tell me you're working to change things from within. Tell me! You're happy with yourselves because here on nettime you're (secretly? or is that openly?) biting the hand that feeds? Come on. All of this intellectually dishonest. Bullshit is really the right word. And it isn't exactly changing the world. I don't pretend to be anything other than a working stiff who has chosen to work in a field I like, for institutions I believe in--arts institutions; high art institutions; fancy educational institutions. I believe in them *in spite of* the Kochs and the Conards. I believe in them because I have seen people inspired by art and ideas and go off to do great things as a result. And I remain in awe of people--like those in Wisconsin as reported on nettime so effectively by Dan Wang--who have in specific instances worked hard to effect political and social change. And I greatly enjoy the posts of those on this list who share ideas, actual ideas, about art, or politics, or religion, but do so without pretending that every keystroke is one step closer to revolution. But all of this other stuff, this I'm a radical, you're not and you clearly don't get it, Sascha D. crap? It's like play acting. You're as boxed in as most people, Brian Holmes. You're just kidding yourself if you think otherwise. SDF # 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
Re: nettime Why I say the things I say
Brian: If my dear friend Mark Stahlman were right, that is, if life in democratic societies were always and ever simply the rule of the powerful minority over the powerless majority, then another consequence must necessarily ensue. Thanks for the shout-out but, as you know, I never said that. g Indeed, ever since the invention of *democracy* it has been a tool used by one group of elites against other groups of elites (specifically the oligarchs in Athens or in the Aegean islands were democracy was imposed on threat of mass-death.) Dictators, emperors and men-who-would-rule-the-world all have to be popular or they won't be on top for very long. Buying votes is a very old story as is freeing slaves and forgiving debts. That's how Mithradates used Greece to fight against Rome 2000+ years ago. Same as what happens in Venezuela now. Social power *requires* broad buy-in -- whether is comes in Ideological, Economic, Military or Political form, as detailed by UCLA sociologist Michael Mann. If we're going to discuss power then we need some basis for our analysis and if you've got a better one than Mann, we'd like to hear about it. The last time we lived in such a situation was the Cold War. There was a unifying ideology as well as economic growth and military patriotism as well as political reform/compromise -- all of which required broad agreement by the population, punctuated by counter-cultures that actually strengthened the consensus. And *ALL* of this was regulated by mass-media. Now it's all gone. We must all, to the extent that we are in the powerless majority, become either hopelessly naive (Well, every capitalist Armageddon has it's cultural silver lining) or we must become hopelessly paranoid (It's all a trap, a Matrix, foisted on the majority of zombies by the minority of all-powerful rulers). Not quite. We must understand society (i.e. our relationships with each other) -- which neither of these options offer. Naive or paranoid? Talk about a rhetorical strawman! g Your audience is neither stupid nor crazy. However, they (mostly) live in post-industrial economies that have fundamentally lost their *coherence* -- so they are understandably confused! We have no common ideology (largely because we were taught that we are citizens of the world, which makes all present-day *culture* is our enemy.) We have no economic growth (and we never told that this is exactly what to expect as a result of digital economics.) We have no enemies around whom we can rally our military (China in the 00s just doesn't substitute well for the Soviet Union of the 50s.) And, we have no shared politics (since the two big tent political parties have collapsed and elections have largely become throw the bum out.) We are, proverbially, up a creek (that we don't understand) without a paddle (because we keep trying things that we know won't work.) I admit it, I sometimes freak out: I think I'm hearing the ventriloquized voice of the enemy. Friend, enemy, dualism, linear, bad. Therefore anyone who has a better solution to this whole problem, go ahead, speak up. Let's go forward with all this. Now you're talking! Everyone has to be *freaking* out! Everywhere! I'll tell you what people *around* the world are doing -- looking for their own LIVING cultures and then exploring their deep roots, so that they have something to rely on in such uncertain times. The Egyptians are doing it. So are the Indonesians. And, the Japanese and Brazilians and Russians. You can be sure that the Chinese are also doing it -- big time. Yes, globalism is finished -- thanks to the Internet! Isn't the question of culture what prompted your reply? Are we to find our culture in the *museums* that Koch et al fund? No, I suspect not. Commodified and detached-from-history displays of this sort are much more likely to *hide* than to *reveal* anything useful about our *living* culture for the simple reason that those who actually construct these exhibits have no culture themselves. It's the staff of the Met who are responsible for what they show, not the benefactors. When I go there I'm always trying to explain what isn't on display and why. Bill Gates is backing Big History. This is typically a first-year college course that teaches complex systems, starting with the Big Bang and ending with Global Warming. _http://www.bighistoryproject.com/_ (http://www.bighistoryproject.com/) While he may have picked the wrong culture (i.e. emergence is arguably a re-tread of the neo-Platonic notion of emanations), he's probably pointed in the right direction -- in the sense that what we are now struggling to compose is a new *cosmology* that is appropriate to living in our digital times. What we really need is some *coherence* precisely because we have
Re: nettime The insult of the 1 percent: Art-history majors
Armin: I find that phrase 'let's be honest' highly problematic and just like 'complex' it serves a certain purpose of cutting discussions short. Not my intent at all. In fact, if you look at my let's be honest comment in context (i.e. the paragraph you took it from), you will see that it was attached to the work of UCLA sociologist Michael Mann and the need to actually understand the sources of social power. That topic is rarely discussed on this list, so perhaps a good way to start our honesty would be to admit how little we know and how much we all need to organize our ignorance. My suggestion is that if we do this -- work hard to understand society (ours, others, in history, through poetry) -- we will find that elites have always been an integral part of the story. So, we need *more* discussion about society, not less! Even in the USA, Mr. Stahlman, there were powerful mass movements of workers and intellectuals who faced down the elites and forced them to make serious concessions. When I was a graduate student at UW-Madison in 1970, I spent many months in the Wisconsin State Historical Society library, which likely has the most extensive collection of radical literature from such movements in the USA (due to LaFollette and the Progressive Party.) I still have my stack 5x7 notecards. Then I became a supporter of Rosa Luxemburg. I can assure you, however, wherever there were concessions there were also elites. While it's an admittedly crude and anecdotal analysis, you should be aware that one of the primary motivations behind many Democrat's social welfare policy initiatives is to ensure that the poor won't burn things down -- or so those *elites* tell me. The Republicans also worry but they have other policy recommendations, albeit with a similar no riots objective. That has been the elite consensus since many cities were (partially) burned down in the 1970s -- which, btw, I see everyday since I live in one of those neighborhoods, where 50% of the buildings on Broadway (two blocks away) were torched back then. At the same time, one of the most enduring effects of Emma Goldman et al were the Palmer Raids, which then became institutionalized as the NYPD Red Squad and is now known as the Intelligence Division, which is actually the US version of MI-5 -- who I first met circa 1973 when their chief physically lifted me off the ground and removed me from a protest I was staging in Cooper Union's Great Hall. So 'let's be honest' there has been maybe always a tendency of the elites trying to rule completely unchallenged, yet lets work to not allow them to get there, because actually they are quaking in their boots ;-) Actually, the problem today is that there ISN'T an *elite* to even do that! This isn't the WASP-dominated 1930s anymore! Today, all there is are is the POLICE and their outstanding request for more *surveillance* -- which now means domestic drones and total net-tapping and extensive efforts at infiltration -- but be clear that they work for themselves. There isn't anything like a statistical 1% with any semblance of class-solidarity because, like the rest of us, they have no *coherence* in their lives. You think you are fighting the 1%? Guess again! So, let's be honest and notice that mass movements are themselves a *feature* of the society in which they arise. Elites and movements have always been intertwined. Understand how *any* society operates and you will understand its mass movements. My suggestion is that we are now in a DIFFERENT society than in the past times, so accounts of movements from the 1930s need to be put into their own context and then related to our own times, Technology changes everything in SOCIETY, so mass-movements that arose under the conditions of *radio* (or television) will be different from movements that arise under the environmental conditions of the Internet. So, also will the nature of the *elites* thoroughly change. They are two-sides of the same technology-defined *environmental* coin. Understand society and understand how media/technology changes society and you will be at least able to honestly have a discussion about the world we live in -- in which more honest discussion needs to *begin* than to be cut short. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # 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
Re: nettime Why I say the things I say
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Brian, and others, Admire is a strong word. Admiration is for me something that happens only rarely. No, Brian, and others who might agree with his characterization of me, I do not admire Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Koch, Olin, or others. Their actions are, as I said before, repugnant in almost every way. I am quite familiar with the Koch funding of conservative groups. Let's take John M. Olin. Every time I walk through the doors of the Olin Library on my campus I curse John Olin and the Olin Foundation for their support of conservative groups, support that was occasioned, supposedly, by a building takeover on the campus of my university. Yet I know firsthand that the Olin Library contains a lot of radical material that, given Olin's support of the Powell memo, Olin would himself find morally reprehensible. Let's continue with universities. The situation of the UC system is an absolute travesty, it's a blight on the state, it's a reneging on promises made long ago. The fact that universities continue to hike tuition in order to pay for more athletic facilities or shinier buildings is also extremely problematic. (Unfortunately cutting tuition will do nothing to stem the funding towards military research on campuses; that change has to come from decreasing government appropriations.) I also find the continued intrusion of corporate monies to be highly problematic as well, something I'm intimately familiar with given where I am in the university, and something I've explored in some projects and writing of my own as well. We also know from the important work going on analyzing the UC system that the humanities and many of the social sciences actually bring in _more_ money than they cost, if we wanted to measure things on such a rubric. Endowment monies that might change the decrease in state appropriations are tied up by donor restrictions; it's too bad the financial exigencies that allow schools to cut staff don't also apply to these restrictions. Graeber and Shukaitis, in their introduction to _Constituent Imagination_, suggest something that I think we ought to consider: what if the radical activity of universities starting in the mid-sixties was itself a blip on a much longer history? That it was only an anomaly within an extensive history of acquiescence to power? Whither universities then? Does this mean those of us who have gone through the system must withdraw our tacit support that comes by being inside it? Here, Brian, I think we disagree. If I read you right, in this message and other recent ones, you would suggest that people in my position do so, pull our labor away from the university or college in order to not contribute to the furthering of an unjust system, of one that, as you suggest, enslaves the students. How does one explain, then, the fact that I have been able to teach courses on radical art and activism for the past three years to first-year students? That we've had them reading about TM, EDT, CAE, subRosa, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, afrofuturism, Hakim Bey, Victor Papanek, Radical Software, the Public School, pirate radio, and Brecht? (And that's just from this year's syllabus.) That is the rare situation where you can work with people for sixteen weeks going deep into concepts they've never encountered before. This of course does take place outside of universities, as you've done, Brian, at the Mess Hall or 16 Beaver, and as others on this list have done at the Public School and innumerable other places. But there is something special about the pedagogical situation of the university, once you begin to break down the hierarchies between the professor/student, once you begin to shape the course more in terms of a discussion rather than a lecture, once you begin to _listen_ to the texts you've been reading for so many years and apply it in practice. This is what I try to do in the courses I teach. I know that others within universities do not have this freedom in their classrooms; that they are watched over as if by cameras; that they must teach as if to a script. Those bureaucratic processes must be fought against as much as is possible. Of course perhaps I'm being deluded, deluded in my belief that this small opening into an otherwise behemoth of a system will do _absolutely nothing other than further the production and accumulation of the system_. But then again I've never been a believer in false consciousness. Museums are a complex (there's that word again!) beast, in my understanding always existing in a complicated relationship with the state and private enterprise in the US. Yet there's a lot of radical art hanging in our oligarch-funded museums, and I sure hope that one day we can recapture it and place it in the cafes as the Situationists suggested. But we won't be able to do that if the museums fall apart, if the artwork gets sold in order to keep the museum or related institution running
Re: nettime The insult of the 1 percent: Art-history majors
The phrase Let's be honest has strong echoes of what the relatively non-political Barthes says about Let's be frank…: it opens the door to stupidity or worse: to the naturalization of opinion as fact, I.e. reification. On May 6, 2012, at 2:59 AM, Armin Medosch ar...@easynet.co.uk wrote: ... # 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
Re: nettime Why I say the things I say
Hey Keith, good to hear from you. On 05/06/2012 05:50 AM, Keith Hart wrote: The first thing that stands out to me is that you identify your own role with that of a critic. There are other ways of engaging society and perhaps we should start with that. Which critics in history do you think made a difference? Cicero? Milton? Rousseau? Poe? Adorno? How did they do it? I think there are tons of writers who have made a difference, and it continues today. Your list is pretty literary - and literature is a strong force, much stronger than people usually give credit. I'm also interested in more humble sociologists, economists, philosophers, and of course... art historians. But you know, critic is just one part. I like to be part of social movements and also experimental art-and-politics groups that come to grips with territorial realities. There are few Adornos and less Poes. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are pretty rare too! No use wishing to be a world-historical genius. How to be part of a grounded community that lives its critique and breathes its alternatives? It's a very good question. That's why a bunch of us go around asking it in the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor! the American left, from its strongholds in New York, Chicago and LA, rarely identifies other social forces that might help to make things budge, choosing rather to demonize the popular majority, their culture and politics, as dupes. What the left is, and what the popular majority is, is a real question in the US (but also France or Germany for that matter). Dan Wang shows in his last post that a broad electoral left has come into existence again through conflict in Wisconsin. That could be a growing tendency nationally, but it isn't yet. In Chicago I still see a big split between a popular, grassroots left that comes out for a primarily Latino immigrant march like Mayday (and for a thousand other everyday causes) and a middle-class liberal left that frankly doesn't know what to do in the face of a police-state, finance-friendly, austerity-enforcing Democrat like Rahm Emmanuel (former Obama chief of staff and now our mayor). Who's the popular majority? There isn't one, there's two or three or more. It's as useless to call people dupes as it is to deny the use of vast machineries for influencing behavior. Proof enough of the latter is the success of the Kochtopus -- ie the huge multi-headed apparatus that the famous two brothers help to fund, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose program Scott Walker has tried to carry out in Wisconsin. Third, all economies combine plural principles and, when the Pentagon is the largest state-run collective in world history, we should think twice before describing the US economy as capitalism. Ours is an age of money (Locke and Marx) which is transitional to a more just society, but where is the world in that trajectory today, when for the first time capital has gone geneuinely global? Keith, you are more confident than I that capitalism's mission has been to bring cheap commodities to the masses. We're looking arguably at some kind of transnational state capitalism, in which the state itself warps beyond recognition. If the crisis of the 70s produced a trilateral governance (Triad power as Kenichai Ohmae said back then) we now see an attempt to widen the hegemony (or stretch the management of hege-money) to include the BRICS. The locus of this attempt has been the G-20 finance ministers meeting. But the hedge funds aren't really cooperating. Moishe Postone has pointed out that under neoliberalism, the classic inability of capitalists to coordinate their efforts globally has returned to plague the whole system. And he said that before 2008 and the Greek debacle! Postone argues for some specific consideration of the greatest critic of Lockean bourgeois property conceptions. I.e. Marx. As a critic I still want to be part of a collective rewriting of Marx for the 21st century. In my view, transnational state capitalism is still failing to deliver the goods we need. Fourth, the Europeans are in worse shape than the Americans and nowhere more depressed than in Britain and France, the empires the US had to displace in order to build their own. If your constituency is the West in decline, why would you expect to locate progressive social forces from populations who live beyond their means because they have the world currency and most of the weapons or another that shelters behind that power to derive unearned income from the rest that is fast running out? Pretty darn good question! I just happen to live here in the Heartland. Where a buncha climate-change deniers, the Heartland Institute, are meeting, hopefully to general scorn, this weekend. Finally, but not really, this is just the beginning, the political economists identified three classes based on property in Land, Money and Labour, landlords, capitalists and workers. What has happened to those classes by the early 21st
Re: nettime Why I say the things I say
jep... it's a circus ... ur in the center ring ... or maybe not ... wait, where's the tent? This whole chain is increasingly silly. Because while Brian and others complain about things like... well if you want real silliness, just wait until the energy sources that have been driving the gravy-train for the last 120 years that cumulatively brought us to the situation where each and every one of us presently is embedded -- govt, elites, proles, academics, farmers, 'sustainability' engineers, media artists, social activists, writers, etc -- just wait until the nipple that supplies the suckle that structures each and every one of those social situations runs dry. the ensuing silliness will make any social designation other than 'might makes right' a quaint and extremely romantic vision that will rapidly be lost to transitory meat-space memory... Translation: At some point, you gotta say to those around you: Stop defending the rulers for their poison gifts. Start attacking them because they are a clear and present danger. And still other people complain that using the word complex is some kind of intellectual trickery... well if you want a demonstration of real complexity, just wait until the energy sources ... etc etc the initial conditions will change, and the system will undergo a major reset, with complexity driving the indeterminate outcome... jh -- ++ John Hopkins Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # 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
