Brian Holmes on Mon, 4 Feb 2002 15:56:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: The degree zero of politics |
It's a useful paper, Tiziana, thanks. Among several other encouraging things, it seems to me you're hinting at something newly possible in so-called "scholarly" work, namely a new kind of crossover, which I think you also preform by presenting the paper both at the London School of Economic and on this "diffusely intellectual" list. The possibility is lurking in a somewhat fuzzy paragraph on methodology: You say your work is to be not a representation of Internet discourses, nor even a semiotic analysis of how they represent the world, but "the conscious choice of looking at Internet debates at the level of a specific cultural and political engagement with the medium, the types of communication that it enables and its relationship with the larger cultural context of late capitalist societies." It'd be interesting to focus in on the fuzzy bit and hear more about what it entails. There is an echo (maybe a totally conscious one?) between this divergence from a semiotic, cultural-studies approach, and the media-activist rejection of television. I hear that echo most clearly in the passage where you formulate the questions of media activists: "Should politics be about the rational debate between a limited multiplicity of clearly articulated perspectives that confront each other in the nominally neutral public sphere which television (ideally) sets itself up to be? Or should politics be about the emergence of singularised and yet collective levels of engagement with practice, taking place below and above the level of representative, mediated communication (between electors and MPs or between audiences and producers)?" Is this not also a question about "the nominally neutral public sphere which THE UNIVERSITY (ideally) sets itself up to be"? It seems to me important (though probably difficult for someone who occupies a university position) to ask this question not only generally of the structure within which one works, but also of the cultural studies discourse which, not coincidentally I think, has above all analyzed the reception of television. I imagine that just as you take care in this paper not to adopt for yourself the wholesale rejection of television, you would be even more careful not to start a scattergun critique of cultural studies. Understandably so. But at the same time, I think that a theory of "singularized and yet collective levels of engagement with INTELLECTUAL practice" might point the way to something like a _social university_, i.e. an extension of the "social factory" concept already developed by the autonomists. It could become a very concrete bid to enable certain new kinds of communication, above and below the functions of mediation that are now performed by university accredited expertise. I see those new kinds of communication at work in the entire social forum movement developing right now, in parallel to the street protests. A concept of the social university would recognize the dissemination of knowledge resources throughout society, consequent in part upon the "refusal of (professorial) work," and it would pose political questions about the specific kinds of social transformations that could make this condition more viable. It might actually be politically important to make the reality of the social university explicit, at a time when it seems very difficult to depend on, say, the LSE for the production of a cultural critique that can change anything at all. And this might also be a way to pursue the epistemological revolution of cultural studies, which to my way of thinking was largely arrested by an infatuation with Saussurean semiotics, with all its bourgeois, rationalist, bureaucratic neutrality. Its _representational bias_, in short. What do you think? best, Brian _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold