Re: <nettime> Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 01/13/2015 03:58 PM, allan siegel wrote:

> Yes, there is a crisis, that shouldnâbe a big surprise but
> what precisely is the crisis?A number of contemporary philosophers
> have been wading into this question for some time now; is it the
> crisis that marks a break with modernity? Quite possibly. Is it
> simply the economic crisis of 2008? No. After floating through years
> of fuelled by the illusions of the post-modern delirium weâe finding
> that it is not easy to get very far if youâe running on empty and
> the consequence finding ourselves stuck in something akin to an
> ideological vacuum.

Hello Allan. In few words you say so much. The "post-modern delirium" 
you refer to is, by my reckoning, the product of the last half century. 
It condenses the various ways that capitalist societies found to bring 
back into their fold all those who revolted against them starting some 
five decades ago. "Post-modern delirium" is the attempted reification of 
a failed revolt. When the lingering dreams and feverish regrets are 
burnt away, what remains is the measured, objectified, manipulated, 
controllable residue of past generations'  struggles for emancipation 
and justice.

For anyone who might care about these things, there is a very 
penetrating author named James O'Connor who wrote books such as The 
Fiscal Crisis of the State, followed by Accumulation Crisis and then by 
The Meaning of Crisis. Three books that address your question. Generally 
people only read the first one, published in 1973, because they want to 
know why the Fordist boom fell apart. The idea that slowly emerges from 
his later work, however, is that in capitalist societies, personality 
crisis can be understood as the momentary breakdown of a social process 
that has led individuals to treat their own selves as objects: 
glittering, pricey, high-status things whose possession and ownership 
gives us power over others. A crisis of value (that is, not only a 
plunge in the cash value of asssets, but also a failure of the 
institutional circuit that sustains cash value) can therefore be a vital 
threat to psychic health and equilibrium. At the moment of the vaccuum 
- ie the empty bank account, the lost job or the failed business - your 
thing, your self, suddenly begins to appear worthless. By the same 
token, though, crisis can also be a chance to exit the strictly 
privatized coccoon of the reified self, and begin understanding and 
acting upon human interdependence. If one cannot simply buy and flaunt 
the simulacra of fulfillment, then some attention to the reciprocities 
whereby people sustain each other becomes not only a necessity, but even 
a new reason for living. Check out how O'Connor describes the conjoined 
process of social and psychic crisis, almost thirty years ago in The 
Meaning of Crisis:

"We know that capital is racing madly through the present; it has raced 
headlong into a crisis. It attempts to reduce its turnover time 
compulsively and obsessively. Modernization of production, 
internationalization of production and a bloated debt structure are 
three sides of a single process. Whole cities and communities are thrown 
away in the race to defend and expand profits. "Growth coalitions" 
multiply like cancer cells, killing the normal cells of family, 
religion, tradition. The frenzy of accumulation; the fear that it will 
come to an end in a huge crash or an environmental or military 
catastrophe; the unbelievable excesses of late capitalism worldwide - 
these bear witness to the obsessive-compulsive qualitity of the inner 
soul of capital. If we could become its inner eye, if we could transport 
ourselves into its inner soul, if we could hear the relentless beat of 
accumulation, we could experience as well as know the madness of this 
obsessiveness â this world where capital and money are a religious and 
aesthetic experience, and where power is a moral category. When we 
examine ourselves, we find capital within our own souls. We too rush 
through the present; we race for some victory â or toward some unknown 
destination; we are governed by unlimited desire; we stumble and fall 
from identity into the abyss. We create our own personal crisis, as 
capital creates its own crisis."

For me, that's an amazing paragraph: it's an economist putting the 
intimate self into the macro-economic picture. Whenever this kind of 
move is made, ethics and then politics surges to the fore. Amidst the 
general wreck and sadness of what happens in the world, the cultural 
question is not just how one suffers but rather how one struggles to 
create one's own crisis - and then hopefully to resolve it, in a social 
space beyond the fiction of a stable and valuable interiority which one 
could polish and improve and flaunt before the desiring gaze of others.


> In fact what is being called the âcrisisâis probably the result of
> the conflation of a host of historical factors: political, economic,
> etcâ So, to view the crisis in the absence of any substantial
> historical context is simply misleading. It is as if we can view the
> recent events in Paris detached from the legacy of French colonialism
> and the post-colonial turbulence that has continued to batter
> Algeria. We live in a global world still very much being buffeted by
> the decades of colonial and imperial hubris that has plundered the
> third world in any number of political guises. The horrendous
> blow-back from this is used to buttress the surveillance states now
> common in the West: high tech snooping tools, random police
> operations which provide citizens with a fragile, fleeting sense of
> security that is regularly shattered by unexpected violence and
> killings. Countless innocents are slaughtered without warning; police
> forces run amokâ

I agree with you entirely. Here we are at the heart of the 
"necropolitics" whose operations the African intellectual Achille Mdembe 
has described, in the space of what he calls "the post-colony," from 
which the killing machines have never been removed. What lies outside 
the policed borders of the developed world is the politics of death, 
that's what Mdembe was saying. But this is not only something 
historical, far from it. To really understand what has just happened in 
France, we would have to see the world through the eyes of the ISIS 
fighters in Iraq and Syria, or the Al Qaeda jihadis in Yemen. After the 
American defeat in Vietnam, the focus of war in what would become the 
neoliberal world-system shifted to the Middle East. To insure the 
continuity of control over the region's resources, time and time again 
entire populations have been bombed to smithereens or starved slowly and 
methodically by a power constellation consisting of the US and its Nato 
allies, Israel, and the aristocratic ruling classes of Gulf states. 
That's death for oil. Meanwhile those Muslims who emigrated to Europe to 
take industrial jobs were treated like trash and then racialized and 
reviled when their usefuleness to capital was over. How can anyone be so 
blind as not to see that the historical injustice of colonialism is in 
full force today, and that it is at the source of the tremendous threat 
that really does confront us? I'm not saying, see through their eyes in 
order to pardon heinous acts. I'm saying, see through their eyes in 
order to do something about the conditions that push people to such 
odious extremes.

On an opposite end of the spectrum, I encourage you to read the 
interview with Luz, the cartoonist of Charlie Hebdo, which Patrice 
Riemens sent to this list. Some of the things this man says are just 
astonishing to me. He claims that the group of caricaturists at Charlie 
did not want to deal with grand symbolic figures but with very specific 
things, images that make sense and are funny in France. But on what 
planet does this guy live? How can he see caricatures of the Prophet 
Muhammad as anything else but a symbol, a charged cliche, a hot-button 
item, a waving red cloak in a vast international bull ring? I am sorry 
to criticize someone whose loss has been so great, but it's pure 
narcissism, this idea of a cherished France that could be held in your 
hand and protected from the world into which it nonetheless sends its 
armies and its oil majors. The sacrosanct caricature of Charlie, 
brandished in the air as a fetish of liberty, is exactly the reification 
of the self that O'Connor describes. I don't know what will come of 
these events, and I don't want to prejudge what French society will make 
of them, but I can see the potential for the very facile patriotic and 
chauvinist defence of a supposedly secular freedom of expression which 
would justify the complete absence of any reflection on the griefs that 
push people to the insanity of terrorism. I have seen this worst case 
happen in the US, with the results that we have before our eyes. What we 
need is not just reflection but action to change the way that the world 
economy functions. Otherwise its necropolitical character will 
inevitably poison whatever fine lands we imagine ourselves to live in.

> It is yet to be seen whether the political movements in Spain or
> Greece can move their societies in a new direction beyond the
> neoliberal economic pincers - I certainly hope they can - but the
> fact that these movements exist is a testament to some tangible
> threads of historical continuity and a capacity to create new forms
> of political organisation.

Today I have been listening to interviews with Yannis Varoufakis, a 
Syriza candidate and potential Finance Minister of a Tsipras government. 
As with Podemos in Spain, these are sensible and spirited people who 
really care about what's going on, I think it is impressive.

> Iâ not being cynical, really, just realistic; we cannot demand the
> impossible but we can manage to to insure that the next generation
> has the tools and the wisdom, to go beyond the ineptness, the
> corruption, and the greed the has polluted so many hard won
> democratic institutions and whittled away the parameters of a just
> society. Unless all the solid, meaningful efforts (in any number of
> disciplines, economic programmes or alternative and innovative
> practices) can coalesce into a political force able to out-manouver
> the status quo of the current political landscape weâe in for more
> stormy weather.

Yeah, that's exactly it. Often well-intentioned people talk about how to 
"transmit" our accumulated knowledge to the coming generations. That's 
not the issue. The question is how to make something useful with that 
knowledge. Which means working with people and changing what you thought 
you knew. The transmission comes from meaningful acts. Ideas matter by 
becoming effectively material.

all the best, Brian

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