Re: <nettime> The alt-right and the death of counterculture

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

This is one of the more challenging pieces I've read on nettime. It must 
speak to many people's experience - certainly it does to mine. I wonder 
if anyone else might like to repond to this one?

> The alt-right has latched onto the transgressive and paranoid libertarian
> style of culture jammers and hackers, which always sat uncomfortably on the
> left, and celebrates the liberation of the individual against ghastly
> sheeple and normie culture. In the process they have disrupted the poles of
> youth culture, allowing for an easy slippage between gaming, lib-hating,
> trolling, unbridled misogyny and fascism. As Nagle writes: ‘When we’ve
> reached a point where the idea of being edgy/counter-cultural/transgressive
> can place fascists in a position of moral superiority to regular people, we
> may seriously want to rethink the value of these stale and outworn
> countercultural ideals.’

Though I could not have imagined the alt-right at the time, after 2008 I 
chose to withdraw from the European art circuit in order not to be lured 
into the self-serving postures that I had analyzed years before in "The 
Flexible Personality." I got into activism because capitalism was 
steering society to a bad end. In the early 2000s had a serious go at 
updating Marxist thoery with Toni Negri and the rest. After the crash, 
when our very sophisticated leftist theories could not stir any 
effective resistance, I did not want to go on inertially mouthing 
stylized slogans whose patent unreality seemed to bother no one. I could 
have moved from France to Spain, where the efforts of the 2000s were not 
drained into art-circuit spectacle but instead drove an attempt to 
change both institutional politics and daily life. But for personal and 
family reasons, I chose rather to return to the US, where at least I had 
to face the increasing irrelevance of both the post-68 counterculture 
and the classical left. How to do this without cynicism and bitter 
disavowal of one's own former strivings is, I think, one of the real 
questions that confronts people of my generation, those who went through 
the wild enthusiasms of the late 90s..

> Nagle writes, ‘every
> bizarre event, new identity and strange subcultural behaviour that baffles
> general audiences … can be understood as a response to a response to a
> response, each one responding angrily to the existence of the other.’ Nagle
> correctly identifies that this self-referential world has as its end an
> amoral ‘liberation of the individual and the id’, and a pathological
> enjoyment at the expense of an other.

These lines, while pitched at Milo and the young sexy neofascists, 
describe a lot of the cultural pranks we used to celebrate in the 
festival circuits emanating out from Amsterdam. The big difference is 
that until very recently, the world was stable and the pranks were 
inconsequential. Now the ways that such nihilism feeds monsters have 
become all too obvious. The style of paranoid critique that many of us 
in the theory-world practiced is complicit in these devastating 
outcomes, because no matter how bad things may be, it is one's 
responsibility to seek for possible ameliorations of the common lot  - 
by which I mean somehting much more widely shared than the rarified 
concept of "the commons." From my viewpoint, the breakdown of 
techno-utopianism requires a sweeping reassessment, a new departure, a 
change of life in short. And obviously, that entails corresponding 
changes in cultural expression. Anyone not working on at lest those too 
levels is way out of date. Liberation can no longer be the keyword for 
the middle-classes, that's for sure.

> The clarification of terms, the
> bracketing of difference and the weighing of utterances from different
> subject positions, cis-males at the bottom, all attempt to make the
> banality of online life urgent and political. In a manner that mirrors the
> data colonisation of the social by new media companies, every difference
> must be celebrated, problematised and deconstructed. Thus there are
> hundreds of genders, Marxist universalism is misogynist, and effacement of
> agency requires reparations through any number of micro-payment platforms.

However the above lines are just as void as what they denounce. There is 
no disciplined Marxist universalism to fall back on, because the 
industrial proletariat was long ago bought off, functionalized and 
absorbed by the industrial welfare state, whose productive promise, 
celebrated by all true Marxists, has turned out to be a Promethean 
overreach culminating in climate change and the many disasters of the 
Anthropocene. The crucial thing now is not to claim any theoretical high 
ground, but to try to understand and pragmatically embody what unites 
those who resist, not only fascism, but also the self-destructiove 
excess of liberalism. Sure, the gender-changing drives of the younger 
generations may be seen as a kind of escapism, but they are also an 
attempt to incarnate, in one's own direct experience, the oppressed 
marginality of the proliferating racialized underclasses who bear the 
brunt of contemporary social violence. The question is not how to 
condemn the kids, but how to be an adult that anyone could possibly care 
about. How to create a transormative outlet for the raw energy of 
alienation? How to work through the really existing institutions, 
towards more responsible kinds of social relations that can withstand 
all the stresses of imperial breakdown?

> The great threat of the alt-right identified by Nagle is that they best
> embody the political potential of networked affect, and that they are able
> to use this infrastructure to accelerate a pure fascist politics of
> jouissance and libidinal frustration. The prevailing tendency on much of
> the self-identified left has been to retreat from the kind of broad popular
> struggle that could be attractive to the politically curious, making ‘the
> left a laughing stock for a whole new generation.’ 

That diagnosis undoubtedly holds for the specific ecosystem of 
neofascists emerging from the expressive orgies of 4chan, but if you 
think that sums up all the world's problems, and that you can cure them 
with Lacan reinterpreted by Zizek, then you are still stuck in the 
illusions of net-critique. The world is going through a giant 
demographic shift that realitivizes the historic privileges of 
whiteness, PLUS a shift in economic and technological power from 
Euro-America to East Asia, PLUS the looming disasters of climate change. 
The neoliberal forms of production, justice and state power are all 
unraveling in the face of these epochal shifts, and the only way to keep 
people from reacting to the chaos in a thousand erratic and dangerous 
ways is to find new social forms to replace those which have become 
irrelevant. This article is great because it pushes you (or at least me) 
to seek out all the hollow illusions of an outdated counter-culture that 
lingered on as a luxury subjectivity, and is now just a useless 
impediment for anyone who remains tangled in its repetitive tropes. But 
the fantasy of a disciplined Party able to take over and dominate the 
historical stage is just a distraction from the real problem of 
formulating and embodying those missing proinciples of production, 
justice and legitimate state power, which all have to be remade anew to 
meet the demands of the future.

And with that little note I'll rest my case!

Brian
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