Re: <nettime> The imaginary institution of society

[allan siegel via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear All,
Thanks Brian and Patrice for your insights into the situations unfolding in France and Italy. I won't attempt to add to the information so far provided. But, in following the unfolding unrest, what startles me, is that  similar manifestations have not appeared in the U.S. where the wholesale dismemberment of the supposedly 'democratic' infrastructure has been taking place under the current Trump regime.

It's not that there hasn't been outrage and actions but there is also a sense of false hope that the electoral process will solve the mess Trump and his proxies have created. This to me says something about the historical nature of the U.S. malaise and people's ability to respond to stark injustices. 

best
allan



On Wed, Oct 21, 2026, at 10:52, Patrice Riemens via nettime-l wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> Brian's essay requires a far longer answer than I am able to provide here, and no, 
> I was not in France the past weeks (but close, and it's flaming up in Italy as well,
> and the response of the authorities look similar) & I won't claim insight either.
> 
> Now for the first point about what goes in the head of the 'anarchists' who burned
> down Limoges' historic - and magnificent - town hall. Nothing , as far as I am concerned,
> or maybe a all encompassing feeling of No Future, themselves included. Nihilism indeed,
> something I am at pain to associate with anarchism. 
> 
> Jean-Luc Melanchon, with a little help from himself (but overwhelmingly by others),
> has been maligned as the source of all evil. Which is BS of course, as he simply points
> out to what others don't want to see, which is that France (& not only) is deeply split
> between haves and haves-nots, to which the former add the insult of a deep disdain for 
> the later. Melanchon's and La France Insoumise's political programme is quite sound,
> immo (just wish the leader was less self-centered), and there is indeed a chance that 
> he will end up as the sole contender for the presidential election in April 2027 - 
> against Marine Le Pen.
> 
> And now everything political in France is about these upcoming elections, whatever 
> the irrelevance in face of the current situation and problems
> 
> Regarding Madame Le Pen, of whom many assume that she 'naturally' will become president 
> next year. I am not so sure. There is one thing that is rilling the Rassemblement 
> National troopers basking in enthousiasm about the current chaos: the very thing they're
> so happy about, namely that it will befall them if their heroine gets elected, something
> they're woefully unprepared for. Their wishes and plans are many, but civil war is 
> not among them.
> 
> And yes, France is structurally, even essentially in big trouble. The whole edifice,
> of institutions, political culture, citizenship principles, etc etc built up in the
> wake of the French Revolution and its aftermath is collapsing - has been for long time.
> Answers based on these elements of the past simply don't work. Has France become a house 
> of cards? Probably not, but it is a house where all wirings and appliances are totally 
> out of skelter. 
> 
> Is France reformable? The recipes exist, but like Brian, I am deeply pessimistic. Zhou
> Enlai used to say that it was to early to judge the outcomes of the French Revolution.
> But in fact the Revolution has never ended and like with the other 'garlic countries' 
> in Europe, the civil war is permanently there, often in the background, and sometimes 
> it flares in the open. 
> 
> Things will probably get worse before they get better - if you excuse the cliché ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Messaggio originale -----
> Da: "Brian Holmes via nettime-l" <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> A: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets" <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> Cc: "Brian Holmes" <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> Inviato: Martedì, 20 ottobre 2026 22:54:36
> Oggetto: <nettime> The imaginary institution of society
> 
> Has anyone been on the streets in France these last days? Does anyone have
> some insight as to what is going on there?
> 
> I wish I could see inside the heads and hearts of the people who burnt the
> town hall in Limoges. I'm fine with the town hall going down but the
> question is, How do they plan to organize society amid its ashes? My
> impression is that this kind of protest has turned to nihilism -
> understandably so. Still the idea that you can just tear down the state
> and something better will replace it is dubious to say the least. In the
> absence of a left alternative, what you will get from burning town halls is
> a fascist police state. We have a strong beginning of that in the US, it's
> ugly and frightful and it's amazing how little effective opposition there
> is. I am also curious whether Jean-Luc Melenchon's communist party, France
> Unbowed, is putting up a viable alternative. Melenchon says the left 'must
> refuse to take part in actions without political meaning and contrary to
> our methods.' Because he knows exactly where this kind of thing leads.
> 
> Yesterday I watched a great film, The Forest in the City, which is about
> the attempt by all kinds of people in Atlanta, Georgia, to stop the
> installation of a giant new police training facility, paid for by the city
> itself (one third) and by a consortium of private corporations (two
> thirds). Great film, but the attempt to stop "Cop City" was a failure.
> Following the initial clashes with forest defenders, including the outright
> murder of one of them - Tortuguita - grassroots social movements in the
> city got over 100.000 signatures to put a referendum about the facility up
> for a vote. The city simply refused to count those signatures. The big
> corporations like Bank of America, Coca Cola, UPS and Home Depot, they got
> what they paid for: cops who shoot to kill. The last stand of the forest
> defenders ended in RICO conspiracy charges brought by the Georgia Attorney
> General against 61 defendants. Those charges were finally thrown out by a
> judge who concluded they were invalid - they did not follow Georgia law,
> which would have required the Governor's authority. Unfortunately this
> decision, two years too late, doesn't change anything in the big picture -
> while the AG's office arbitrarily made its own law, the movement was
> crushed and Cop City was built. The forest defenders and the referendum
> activists failed because there was no larger civil-society opposition to
> the corporate state. It's no wonder people become nihilistic. They have no
> other choice.
> 
> How to elicit a really broad cross-class cross-race opposition to
> oligarchical capitalism? Doesn't it need a workable vision of a just
> society? Is such a vision even possible today? I really doubt that French
> society is ready for Tarnac everywhere, that is, self-managed communes in
> the countryside and mega-squats in the cities. Nor was the US ready for the
> visions produced by the George Floyd movement, of which police and prison
> abolition was the best - but totally unworkable, in the short term at
> least. The propaganda of the deed is one big dead end. Yet in both France
> and the US there are definitely people who can see beyond the burning cars,
> to focus on the legitimate demands of youth, minorities and impoverished
> workers. Is there any way to produce viable social visions amid these
> uprisings? Are there subjectivizing processes that could lead to a new,
> more just and more stable society? Who would be able to promote and realize
> such visions? How are they doing it?
> 
> I remember very clearly when Cornelius Castoriadis published La montee de
> l'insignifiance (The Rising Tide of Insignificance) in 1996. The title
> shocked everyone. There were interviews on TV and whatnot. Looking over the
> table of contents today, one essay jumps out: "The Crisis of the
> Identification Process." People are no longer able to identify with the
> imaginary of their society, that is, with *the representations that society
> produces of itself.* In France that imaginary is currently embodied by the
> image of Macron against a white-and-gold background, it's the Start-up
> Nation, it's rich fucks with their luxury shops on the Champs-Elysées and
> it's hipsters with their cafes and consumer fetishes sitting on expensive
> real estate in opulent cities that half the country can't afford to even
> visit anymore. A majority cannot identify with that, it's a neoliberal
> abomination. But what happens to the person who can't identify with any
> aspect of the existing society? They lash out, of course. Or maybe they
> become withdrawn and catatonic, or cult followers, or most likely of all,
> fascists clinging to imaginaries of the distant past.
> 
> Castoriadis thinks that Western societies in the 19th and 20th centuries
> had a self-contradictory and therefore dynamic self-image: founded
> simultaneously on the capitalist desire for mastery (science, technology,
> markets, domination) and the enlightenment desire for autonomy (the
> workers' movement, public education, participatory democracy). Cut the
> democratic part off and you are left with the dominant and the dominated.
> What can the dominated identify with? Only some very partial representation
> of society - maybe a religious cult, or a racial or gender identification,
> or just an us-and-them story, a conspiracy theory. It's not easy to survive
> as a splinter group. You have to continually validate yourself against
> everything you can hear or see. Eventually the splinter pierces you. You
> can go insane if you're not careful.
> 
> If you're a cultural producer, and therefore involved with producing those
> imaginary images, those partial self-representations of some kind of viable
> society, then the question becomes urgent. What kind of identification -
> what kind of subjectivizing process - do your images induce? If you examine
> most current cultural production, you will find it contributes almost
> nothing to a potentially viable self-image of society. But if yours does,
> bravo, you're ready for the second challenge: How can a partial
> identification produce anything more than an illusion or a cult or a
> nihilistic black bloc? People in Atlanta, over a hundred thousand people,
> did their best to transform the Cop City occupation, with all its violent
> clashes and sabotage, into the positive choice of a forest park over a
> militarized control center. And the occupiers themselves asked for nothing
> more. In return they were disdained, silenced, crushed, even killed.
> Apparently the middle classes opted for Bank of America and Coca-Cola.
> Under today's conditions, that's clearly the fascist option.
> 
> We need visions of radical transformation, able to benefit entire
> populations. And we need ways of preserving and sharing those visions,
> those partial identifications with the image of a not-yet existing society.
> We need strategies for keeping alternative images alive under repressive
> conditions, and also, for increasing their capacity to reach out and
> convince others who do not immediately share our own values and desires.
> Dead-end radicalism paves the royal road to fascism. It's time to reinvent
> leftist culture.
> -- 
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