<nettime> Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology

[Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com>]

Exactly, dear Morlock!

Which means we have to go "more Freudian than Freud himself" at this
junction, since even the old and cynical Freud was deep at heart a
Rousseauian who insisted that "truth will set us free". The Freud of
"Civilisation and Its Discontents" in the 1930s. And with him the entire
ultimately naive Frankfurt School. No, truth is never available to us. It
is the lower degree of lying that we must aim for since this is what is
indeed available to us. After a lot of hard work.

Lacan makes this break with Freud with his models of the conservatism of
all organisms, the defense of olf models at cognitive dissonance, and
ultimately the break into psychosis when old models break down, unless new
more functional models have arrived by then. Both dividually and socially.
We all keep whatever ideologies we seem to have - with their idiosyncrasies
- until we finally have new models (or ideologies if you will) available to
us that "seem" to work better.

Which is why the next revolution will not happen in the streets (we need to
get over Paris 1789 and even more so Paris 1968 as our model) both in our
minds and our digital environments once this new ideology of digital-global
solidarity has become available to us. And to get there we need both
technology, ideology and a good dose of destinal luck. A return to the
depth of our timeless psyches in the current chaos (humans do not change,
technology does, and ideology must change with it).
Meanwhile populism will rule The Old Left and cause one major hype after
another followed by increasingly worse disappointments. In this regard and
speaking Lacanese: "Bernie Sanders is not it". Sanders might speak warmly
about American industrial workers but he does so completely ignoring
Chinese or Mexican workers in the process. And his budget maths do not add
up. At all.

Sanders might have his heart in the right place (and doesnät Obama too with
his sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous pacifism?), but merely the
way an old preacher is still peaching in a rural church to the already
converted while the factory landscape in the cities is on fire but
completely out of his scope. Like populists always have.
Occupy is therefore a good t-shirt (bless them) which however never manages
to even conquer the t-shirt factory where it is branded.
So this is the time to subtract, reflect and produce brand new and way
deeper ideology than what we have done during the past 100 years. We need
to kill poststructuralist cynicism, create new ideology to understand
ourselves and our predicament better. We need new monasteries to do this.
And most of all, we need to get over Marx. I agree with Zizek, Hegel is the
way forwad to do this. As always at historical locks.
Then we can make real change. Change of heart and body. Until then,
fighting for encryption between us (think Telegram, the most impressive
Russian innovation since Sputnik) is where the current struggle is at.
Fight the FBI for Apple, then fight Apple, but not to set us free but to
create new societies based on masses of open source technologies.
Always remember this tiny strategical detail: Once college kids get laid
their political staying power is zilch. As St Paul and Lenin would both
happily tell us.

Which is why the barricaders of 1968 quickly became wealthy conservative
yuppies once the dust settled. No, a new class with a new ideology is the
only possibility of genuine revolution. And such ideologies are derived
from the potentialties of new technologies.
My hope resides with participatory culture. I'm personally already immensed
in it.

So may I then speak Lacanese once again and provoke her on the rather
unified Nettime list: What if your beloved Neoliberalism "does not exist"?
Best intentions
Alexander Bard (call me accelerationist if you will, but I'm all for
Hillary Clinton next November)

2016-04-17 4:47 GMT+02:00 <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>:

> The widespread imposed or voluntarily adopted anonymous (or not so
> anonymous) ideologies, that facilitate the demise of their believers, are
> hardly a new phenomenon. Expecting that naming them is going to change
> anything is a fallacy.

<...>


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