<nettime> Present, past, amnesia, and rearview mirror

Hi Garnet, yes, you're right, fuck the fetishization, and we need to pay attention to other forms of thought, "minor" (in the Deleuzian & Guattarian sense... sorry...) thinkers; yet let's be careful to not produce a total amnesia, like people who would write as if nothing was written before them, shouting "Voilà!" about something already written/explained/defined one thousand times before them. Not bad sometimes to take a look into the rearview mirror.

A gesture of rejection of the past is a gesture kept repeated. "Modern" and dangerous.

Besides, even a reading of neglected writers has to make appear that which was not written, or read - it's the same thing - "to read what was never written" (Hofmannsthal). Hermeneutics anyway.

So, let's read Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs "with the most powerful force of the present" (Nietzsche).

Best,

Frederic Neyrat

On Mon, Jun 17, 2019 at 9:07 AM Garnet Hertz <garnethertz@gmail.com> wrote:

Emaline: based on your response, it looks like you have the same careerism as Seb. No?

1. Why would anybody use the term "imbricated" in a tweet without being insecure? https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/
2. I don't hate Foucault and Deleuze (I did my PhD w Mark Poster, perhaps one of the bigger fans of these guys) - but thinking that advanced thought starts and stops with these people is totally lazy scholarship.
3. Max Herman: "I sometimes think the flaws or errors in three main names -- Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche". Sounds okay, but is about a hundred years late.
4. Seb may be trying to keep academia alive, but this sort of resembles a zombie life form that isn't worth the life support.

I think I'm primarily gagging at a fetishization of the same group of guys that everybody worships: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson, etc. It's totally true that they really are fantastic: I think I literally have every printed word of all of these people on my bookshelf. I also still consider Baudrillard the best theoretical summary of my life's work, for example -- his writing is amazingly inspiring and bright. But by continuing to worship the same incantation of sacred names we really run the risk of our outfit (critical studies, digital humanities, or whatever) of becoming totally irrelevant and disconnected from the tools and dialogue of today. In my opinion, if your scholarship is focused on Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche then maybe you're in a stagnant nostalgic backwater of thought. There are so many new tools, techniques and scholars that bring so many fresh perspectives on different topics that we need to dig down and do work on instead of just taking for granted the names that our grad advisors assigned us. If nothing else, we really owe it to the non-European and non-male scholars around us that have done fantastic, vigorous scholarship. If we're writing theory or history it's up to us to dig deeper into the archive of this stuff and put the effort to find people outside the canon and write them into history. This is what great historians do, I think. They worry less about careerism and focus on paying attention to what is actually going on in the real world - and they formulate a fantastic way to summarize the gestalt of it without leaning on a bunch of clichés. They cut a fresh and insightful path. If nothing else, your long term careerism will accelerate by stepping out of your theoretical safe zone. Fuck Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Jameson -- not that they're wrong, but that there are a lot of other people that deserve our attention that have been totally neglected. The well-known folks had enough coverage already - they are useful in establishing a base zone for your arguments, but I really think all of these individuals would agree with me in moving forward. I think they'd say "Move on and clue in to what's happening now" -- or maybe encouraging us to not totally fetishize May 1968.

In summary, I'd like to try to encourage people to be more like an inspirational groundbreaker than a careerist schmuck, I guess. Only a few beyond the small circle of critical studies colleagues genuinely care about the chain of thought between Freud-Marx-Nietzsche. Not that they're useless, but that a lot has happened since they were writing. We're in a significantly different world than when these folks were around. The work isn't completely useless, just not the best set of tools for discussing the problems of today. No?

Garnet

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 1:34 PM Emaline Friedman <emalinefriedman@gmail.com> wrote:
Garnet,

I laughed at your response ! Not at all interested in tearing you apart, but wanting to explore this sense of "who cares?", toward which I'm also inclined.

What really makes me think "who cares" is the obvious careerism baked into the argument. I think one could put Seb's basic idea in a tweet and credit Kojin Karatani: "all the modes of control are imbricated. everything is happening all at once". Hence we have digital feudalism, social coercion via reciprocity, state surveillance, and the marketization of everything a la real subsumption simultaneously. Great. Now what?

As a young person emerging from grad school, I often think that if we were actually adapting to the abundance of the net that no one would be reading Foucault and Deleuze anymore. They're already perfectly distilled and advanced upon by diligent secondary readers who have used them well. And yet...one must continue to read "the greats" even when there isn't much left to mine. A perfect example is this tone of "I'm going to show you something you've NEVER SEEN BEFORE in these mystical 6 pages of Deleuze's writings! Voila!":

Could it be that the final sketch of control, the “Postscript on Control Societies,” encrypts the kind of multithreaded historical method that is necessary for engaging with the epistemic demands of the period it ostensibly defines?

I am read in Deleuze, adore his thought, and I've never understood why people have this sort of "there's gold in them hills!" attitude about the Postscript in particular. It's of very minor academic interest at best that Deleuze makes an uncharacteristic judgment call (things are getting worse, not better). I'd actually love it if anyone on this list would like to convince me otherwise.

But back to the point...maybe this text isn't unhinged from reality, but demonstrates the reality that academic grooming is primarily aimed to keep academia alive. So Seb and many of us here think thoughts just lofty enough to subordinate direct action to spending inordinate amounts of time reading and writing theses that basically say "history isn't neat, everything is in play".

And yet! I like to read texts like these! They inspire me. I work in open source tech now and ideas like these both remind me that what I do is culturally important, and WAY more important than my ego needs, it's a real site of struggle. When I share these ideas with my collaborators, we think critically together about how our abstract plans will hit the "ground" as habitus for users.

TLDR if you think a work of theory is too abstract, it's probably inspiring someone "on the ground", anyway. if you're uncomfortable with a division of labor whereby academics do this and other people do other stuff, take my and probably most other nettimers' lives as evidence that such a division is not fixed