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

I agree that the "absolute failure of the West" is rhetorical vagary. But the idea that central societal tenets concerning "freedom" and "democracy" must be subjected to theoretical and practical critique is not.

Currently one is free to extract fossil fuels, and also free to die in a flood or a forest fire. Yet the one who extracts (maybe a deep-sea drilling company registered in the Caymans) and the one who dies (maybe an immigrant in a basement apartment in New York) are not the same. If our theory of democracy worked, the extracting and the dying would both be legitimate because we "all" (or at least a majority of us) elected the lawmakers who set the conditions under which the fuels would be extracted (and the rains, rained, and the forests, scorched). So it would be our own damn fault. But in North America and Britain and Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere (not to say "the West"), for decades there has been no chance to subject this legitimacy to a theoretical and practical critique, because even if people with such intentions are elevated to power by elections, others immediately show up yelling about their freedom.

In the backwoods of Oregon, which is having a brief respite from the fires in order to become the worst site of the coronavirus epidemic, I literally saw a guy in a cafe with a tee-shirt that read "I can't hear you -- over the sound of my freedom." That tee-shirt was the triumphant _expression_ of decades and billions of dollars worth of corporate manipulation, including money direct from the Caymans. The same collective forces helped send a bunch of wing nuts to the US Capitol to rant about their individual freedom last January 6.

The theoretical critique of freedom and democracy has not been adequately done, but the practical critique is moving ahead fast. When New York and environs suffer more damage and death from a hurricane than Louisiana does, you can expect an infrastructural response. But here's the rub: in the absence of a theoretical/practical critique of capitalist democracy, the response will be, not decarbonization, but enhanced protection for the most well-off members of society.

The biological concept of symbiosis, and the integral evolutionary analysis of earth system science that sprang from it, offer a viable theoretical basis for practice (and a better one than the "accidental" theory of mutation that Stiegler drew on). Rather than freedom, these ideas point to interdependency as a necessary condition for continuing evolution. Stiegler was well aware that in order for such a theoretical outlook to become practical, a better idea of individuality had to be worked out, and space had to be opened up for individual contributions to collective transformation, in place of *absolutist* declarations of individual freedom. There's the arena for cultural innovation today, imho.

Brian

On Fri, Sep 3, 2021 at 12:14 AM Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de> wrote:

please (Daniel Ross), define "absolute failure (of the West)".

-a

ps: i suggest to leave room, in this definition, for failures of yet
other proportions.

pps: looks like adjectives are generally up for grabs these days and
might become redundant rubble, if not signifiers of the opposites, like
"precise(ly)" in many philosophical discourses.

Am 02.09.21 um 23:44 schrieb Sean Cubitt:
> thanks for circulating Patrice
>
> there's a great piece responding to similar issues byDaniel Ross (aka
> Stiegler’s translator):
>
> https://mscp.org.au/plague-proportions/this-pandemic-should-not-have-happened
> <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
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