Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism

[Ted Byfield via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 21 Dec 2023, at 4:38, Siraj Izhar wrote:

> But on all this, let's talk here not just about the silence in the current situation in Berlin but also the noise that lives off it and amplifies itself. And of the types of silence in the face of an ongoing genocide played out on screen and social media. Of who then is staying silent and who is making noise?
>
> The silence of the endowed, those with rights is never the same of silence of those with conditional rights - of residency and so forth, the silence of the precarious. One silence does not know the other. The Staatsraison is playing with this so different silences entwine with the silence of fear and a fear of silence. German society is becoming segregated by differentiations of silence. In workplaces, at schools, universities. Segregated by those who fit its memory culture and those who don't.

Siraj, this is right on.

My argument was that silence is never one thing, never the same — and that we need to listen for, and learn from, those subtle differences. I was absolutely clear that it was *not* an argument for quietism or passivity, but what I said was deliberately misrepresented in that way to score cheap points. That's not interesting, but the hostility to the argument is worth examining — because, beneath the interpersonal nonsense, it points to a tension between different imaginaries of what "leftism" is. On one hand, we have idealized, often nostalgic traditions and images of mass manifestations like public debate and popular revolt; on another hand (not *the* other hand — there are more than two), we have more reflective, individual traditions of critical inquiry, analysis, theorizing, etc. These have never coexisted easily own organically with each other, but the rise of the net exacerbated these tensions in new ways. In a textually driven environment like nettime, it's easy to dismiss "lurking" in terms of negation: passivity, inattention, inhibition, etc. But one of the strengths of this list was how important it's been even for people who rarely or never speak up: they may be silent on the list, but the ideas they draw from it manifest themselves elsewhere, in ways we rarely see.

More positively — and more to the point — in another mail Felix made a crucial point about the changing nature of power:

> 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. Contemporary power counts. By that, I don't mean that it's obsessed with money -- sure it is, but that is no news -- but the dominant way of understanding reality has shifted. It's statistical, that is, based on correlating endlessly shifting patterns, using volatility as a resource. Logical coherence doesn't matter and producing logically coherent arguments has become an aesthetic practice (it's not a coincidence that most of us, myself included, work in the art field). This also contributes to why cultural institutions themselves fold so easily. They are focussed on numbers (rather than articulating discursive positions) themselves.

On some level, I think this is informed by Justin Joque's book _Revolutionary Mathematics_, which is utterly brilliant — in part because he builds on the neglected project Moishe Postone pursued in his book _Time, Labor, and Social Domination_.

As I see it, leftism is bedeviled by conflicting imaginaries, some newer, some older. I won't pretend to have an exhaustive or authoritative view of this question, so here are just a few examples:

### Protests, demos, etc: they're genuinely important AND ALSO they're a ritual reenactment of oppositional manifestations from earlier regimes of power. That helps to explain how and why they're often so frustratingly ineffective: contemporary power understands, in new ways, their faddish natire and simply waits them out, variously ignoring and/or misrepresenting them. But it also sheds helpful light on the exceptional nature of the immense anti-Netanyahu demonstrations that took place *every week* in Tel Aviv for months on end — until they were suspended in the wake of Hamas's attack. That suspension is a form of silence, yes, but it would be a catastrophic mistake to lump it together with every other — because deposing Netanyahu is a sine qua non of even the beginnings of peace in the region, and those protest made the depth and extent of opposition to him plain for all to see.

### Clicktivism: For years, maybe decades now, it was fashionable to dismiss online activism as feel-good, symbolic, ineffective, etc. And, again, those arguments had and have real merit. But they also ignored the possibility that what was being dismissed — and often cast as a form of silence compared to physical manifestations — might have been an early stage of newer kinds of 'online' political engagement, say, of the kind that's become common in social media: everything from open-source intelligence projects like Bellingcat, "clapbacks," composited videos with commentaries on tweets, videos, etc, which have become *very* effective tools for challenging dominant narratives in media. My point isn't that there's a clear genealogy, it's that the criticism were (a) short-term in their focus, and (b) made on the basis of what I think is, in part, a nostalgic view of what constitutes "real" activism, leftism, etc. And: note that few if any would argue that "clicktivism," memes, etc have been ineffective tools for the right; on the contrary, they're widely seen as being one of the most effective organizing tools the right has mastered. If indeed the right drew strength from this stuff, they didn't do it by dismissing the people doing it — on the contrary, it studied them, learned from them, and mobilized them.

There are more examples, but I think the point is simple enough: activism is both real *and* imaginary — not in the negative, pop sense of "not real" but, rather, in the sense of shaped by *an imaginary*. But there are many imaginaries, aren't there?

So, again: when someone laments the "silence on" some subject, one way to understand that gesture — just one way, not the only ways — is that it assumes  a traditional, even nostalgic model of discourse, and on that basis diagnoses a collective failure. But, as I think Siraj suggests, we don't need to do that. And one way (again, just one), is to recognize that apparent silences can also be seen in terms of diversity — for example, a widespread sense that noisy public debate on a subject can be ineffective or even counterproductive.

There's no easy way to resolve these tensions, or even difficult ways, because I don't think they can ever be resolved. But mocking the suggestion that paying close, inquisitive attention even when people *don't* "speak out" doesn't have much merit. For example, if we had to place that kind of mockery in the context of how recent liberationist movements like #BLM or #metoo unfolded, where would we find it?

Cheers,
Ted
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