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