Brian Holmes on Wed, 2 Aug 2006 09:52:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Re: rejoinder: is a radical project identity achievable? |
Alex Foti writes: "In Castellsian terms (tell me Felix if I got it right), bushist occidentalism is a legitimizing identity and shia/sunni fundamentalism is a resistance identity. Castells contrasts these two forms of social identity (for him, networks and identities are all there is on the globe) with progressive and transformational project identities, such as feminism and environemntalism. "My point then is this: what kind of project identity would be needed to stave off this double threat to the basic welfare of humankind? And even harder but more crucial, can the inheritors of the Seattle-Gothenburg-Genoa movement, as well as other radical and progressive forces, achieve it?" Alex, you're one of the people who make a difference, and I agree, your question is the right one. Plus you introduce it by reference to my text on Network, Swarm, Microstructure, so it's the perfect chance to respond to the rejoinder. Originally I was gonna rework that text for the Dictionary of War. But the urgency of the present required something different. The text on global microstructures raised what's almost a "technical issue," something precise and particular. It focused on the disruptive power of four very different self-organizing groups, all outside of institutional control: financial speculators; Al Qaeda; open-source hackers; anti-globalization movements. Each of these communicates through specific technical networks, but also operates within an overarching cultural horizon of shared values and images. The point was that each in its own way has driven the globalization process forward in a kind of wild rush. But what used to be the anti-globalization movement in Europe, North America, Australia and such places is obviously not doing that anymore. Your interest in all these ideas might have been piqued when I included the Euromayday networks as a disruptive microstructure. And I think you saw something naive, utopian or angelic in Lazzarato's vision of the activist ("she creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of desires, of images, to put them at the service of the multiplicity's power of articulation"). The activist question is always what to do, how to achieve a better world? The part of that question that I'm working on is: What kind of culture, what kind of shared horizon can help us get there? What I think is that the mystique of disruption and the utopia of self-organization are not enough. To fixate on that is backward-looking, I agree. The problem is that these aspects fit too smoothly into the bubble economy of the nineties, what I called capitalist "deterritorialization" in the microstructure text, and what I tried to define much more precisely as the "breadth phase" of fusions and acquisitions, in my recent text on Peace-for-War. The thing that Guattari saw so clearly is that capitalism's great waves of de-territorializing expansionism are always accompanied by regressive re-territorialization, i.e. nationalism, fundamentalism, or what you call "bushism" and "occidentalism" in the case of the Nato countries. In my more recent text I wanted to identify the hard core of occidentalism, namely the oil companies, weapons dealers, engineering corps like halliburton. The point is that this kind of regressive nationalistic corporate militarism is the reflex of the whole capitalist system, whenever boom goes bust. And there are deep structural interests that make such a reflex possible, even encourage it, press for it, realize it. The current war shows the impossibility of just thinking European. What's happened is that a whole new productive system has been installed, at a world scale, over the years of expansionism from the mid-80s to 2000. Now the struggle is on to see how this new system can be institutionally regulated - culturally, economically, politically, militarily. It's comparable, but not the same as what happened after the Fordist invention of production lines for automobiles: you had the expansionism of the 1920s, a depression in the 30s and then war in the 40s to decide who was going to be able to frame the institutions. But now the US, which was halfway enlightened or at least had some kind of twisted generosity in the postwar period, has become almost a despot, probably because of its status as a pure rentier society, dependent on Chinese and other labor for its wealth, with financial and military power its only specialties. Is the worst side of this declining power going to create the institutions for the productivity of a new world society? Or worse yet, is that society going to just immediately fall apart into extended war? Things are going so fast, it's no wonder people are confused, me too in fact! As for the movements you mention, I think we're stuck with being an active minority in these world networks: we have to experiment with the real-time sharing of words, images, forms, gestures, actions and insurgencies, all those things that are described so imperfectly by the image of a swarm. But the out-of-control imagery of the 90s isn't something to live for, and the multitude isn't gonna happen by accident either. If we want to build on the first big experiment of the Seattle-Gothenburg-Genoa days, if we want to go beyond the backward-looking Third-Worldism of the Social Forums without giving up any solidarity with the South and with all oppressed and impoverished people, we have to give the microstructures of resistance much more coherence, by building a sky above, a horizon of shared analyses and orientations (not to say values: I mean orientations, directions, possibles). We can't just be opportunistic and hope to hitchhike with what might again appear as the gains of the new productive system, gains for those within the privileged countries of the western core. We have to really cooperate on solid critical understandings of how technoscience is being deployed in the world and the damage it's doing, and we have to maintain that critical awareness along with more forward-looking visions, so that our multicultural, multisexual expressions and our organizing strategies don't just get seduced into participation in the business cycle again, if another breadth phase comes in the next few years. Good times for flexworkers is never gonna be enough. What climate change and peak oil and Bush and Israel's war on Lebanon are showing us is how unbelievably dangerous this phase of setting up the new global institutions really is, how much disaster it could end in. You say, pink, green and wobbly in Europe, and I say, yes, that's it, but let's not be afraid of the philosophy and dialogism of human potentials, the science and the cosmopolitics of ecological balance, the strategy and technique of organizing industrial development in the world. I've been participating in the Euromayday movements as much as I can, I'm OK with the pop style of organizing, but I think if we want a real project identity, a deep intense and open microcosmic horizon for networked movements that can actually influence the institutional changes, then we have to make sure that the images and slogans don't lead back to the faked desire of the consumer markets and the dream factories of daily life - or back to the revolutionary fantasies of agitators who get left behind by reality. A political culture that can resolve serious differences between dissenting groups, and can draw plans for using and governing the productive forces that make and shake the earthscape, is what the post-68 left never developed and we need it badly, man. Not the endless Marxism of 1917 and the appeal to "industrial working classes" that have been bought off and normalized into reactionary submission long ago. Nor the lazy critique of "the West" as a metaphysical absolute, and more lip-service for whatever revolt that appears outside, no matter how fanatical. Instead, the capacity to provoke and win confrontations over the new labor issues, while conceiving and debating the strategic place of those conflicts within global ecological and anti-imperialist struggles, always remixed through the transforming filter of sexual and cultural potentials that don't just become the assertions of someone's ego. A project identity, OK, but the word is so poor, such a suffocating horizon for a human being. I think we're talking about something to live for, and the ways to get it too. The exact science of our unbound dreams is what governments should be afraid of. best, Brian # 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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net