Re: <nettime> Covid and the crisis of neo-liberalism

thanks for circulating Patrice

there's a great piece responding to similar issues by Daniel Ross (aka Stiegler’s translator):

https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened

a flavour:

"Anthropogenic climate change and the systemic limits with which it is associated indeed define the fundamental emergency situation with which we are confronted today. The possibility of facing up to this emergency depends on recognizing that this accident must become our necessity, a necessity whose impure technological, but also social, economic and political conditions are alone what make possible the exercise of collective intelligence, belief, wisdom and decision. The temptation is always to say that freedom and democracy are the fundamental requirements for making good collective decisions, and yet the absolute failure of the West over the past two years means that these ideas must absolutely be subjected to critique, where the latter is never a denunciation, but an interrogation of their ‘pharmacological’ limits"

seán

Seán Cubitt | He/Him

Professor of Screen Studies
School of Culture and Communication
W104 John Medley Building
University of Melbourne
Grattan Street
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA

scubitt@unimelb.edu.au

New Book: Anecdotal Evidence

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anecdotal-evidence-9780190065720?lang=en&cc=au#

Latest from the Lambert Nagle writing partnership

https://books2read.com/u/4NXA1W

<snip>

The comprehensive crisis of neoliberalism may have unleashed creative intellectual energy even at the once-dead centre of politics. But an intellectual crisis does not a new era make. If it is energising to discover that we can afford anything we can actually do, it also puts us on the spot. What can and should we actually do? Who, in fact, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil demonstrate, democratic politics is taking on strange and unfamiliar new forms. Social inequalities are more, not less extreme. At least in the rich countries, there is no collective countervailing force. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that continuously multiply risks. The principal use to which our newfound financial freedom has been put are more and more grotesque efforts at financial stabilisation. The antagonism between the west and China divides huge chunks of the world, as not since the cold war. And now, in the form of Covid, the monster has arrived. The Anthropocene has shown its fangs ? on an as yet modest scale. Covid is far from being the worst of what we should expect ? 2020 was not the full alert. If we are dusting ourselves off and enjoying the recovery, we should reflect. Around the world the dead are unnumbered, but our best guess puts the figure at 10 million. Thousands are dying every day. And 2020 was a wake-up call.

Adapted from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World?s Economy by Adam Tooze, published by Allen Lane on 7 September

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