Christian Swertz via nettime-l on Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:58:28 +0100 (CET)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism 

Dear Felix,

Am 21.12.23 um 00:25 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
That model does not work anymore. 
As far as I remember Habermas excluded the proletarian public from his 
analysis. Thus it might be the case that the theory is still usesful and 
the examples that were used to illustrate the theory still exist (at 
least in my neighbourhood there is something like a middle class) - but 
the proletarian public became louder. Thus it might necessary to extend 
Habermas theory to include the proletarian public. I have to admit that 
I'm not aware of convincing attempts in this direction.

We can speak "truth to power" all day long. Millions are marching 
against the war in Gaza. But, simply, arguments don't count. 

To me, that sounds a bit surprising. You mean the number of people 
marching is an argument? Probably not. But yes: We observe the reporting 
of a war (that is: a media reality) - but in the reality of wars, spoken 
arguments don't count. For a deliberate democracy, peace is a condition. 
To me, attempts to understand wars is as useless as understanding 
religion. In this respect, I consider the theory of value spheres as 
useful: Truth in a war is not identified by the best argument, but by 
the biggest weapon, in religion by conduct in accordance with God, in 
economy by profit and so on. If you locate yourself in a scientific 
sphere or an arts sphere, you simply can not understand wars. You can 
claim that wars are not theoretically justified or not beautiful - but 
these claims are not relevant in wars. Obviously, this also holds true 
the other way round: You can not justify scientific truth with a gun. 
Thus power is not power.  There are different types of power. This might 
explain your observation:

But it's more than that, power doesn't speak anymore, it doesn’t need 
argumentative justification, not even dishonest one. Has Trump ever 
made a single argument? No. 

He did - he won an election. That's truth in politics. In politics, you 
need to win elections in order to be right (well - at least in some 
political spheres). It is not relevant how you win elections - you just 
need to win them. If you can exploit scientific results or weapons for 
that: good. But scientific results of weapons are not relevant in 
politics as they are in sciences and wars. The meaning of relevance is 
just different. You have to turn scientific results or a weapon into a 
fetish or a symbol (at least from these scientific perspectives - not 
from a political perspective) to be successful, which might explain this 
one:

Logical coherence doesn't matter 

Absolutely. And it never did in politics (unless you can convince voters 
with logical coherence). So - nothing new in this respect. Still the 
same old story.

--
Liebe Grüße,

Christian Swertz
http://www.swertz.at

--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org