Brian Holmes on Sun, 6 Aug 2006 00:50:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Re: rejoinder: is a radical project identity achievable? |
[Post from Benjamin Geer, benjamin.geer@gmail.com, addressed 2 days ago to me and nettime, never made it on nettime. -BH] On 01/08/06, Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr> wrote: > What kind of culture, what kind of shared horizon can > help us get there? [...] > 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 [...] > The exact science of our unbound > dreams is what governments should be afraid of. Brian, I sympathise immensely with your motivation for asking these questions, but I think this quest for a universal progressive political culture is Quixotic and perhaps dangerous, despite the best of intentions. In 2002 I fell under the spell of a hypothesis: that some of the principles of what I saw as the political culture of free software -- open participation, public ownership of knowledge, strong reliance on consensus -- could be applied to other kinds of production -- to industry, to agriculture -- and could be used to build political systems capable of organising human life on a large scale. I was encouraged to find similar principles at work in some European activist groups and workers' collectives. I was disappointed to find that many activist groups, however, were organised along the opaque, authoritarian lines of traditional political parties, and speculated that if European social movements could be persuaded instead to put these principles (described at http://www.open-organizations.org) into practice, they would not only do their work as activists better, they would also embody a real alternative to the failed models of parliamentary democracy and of the political party, an alternative that might thus appeal to the broader disillusioned European public. Indeed, I wondered, could these principles become part of a political culture capable of working on a global level, a new universalist dream to replace the failed dream of communism, in short the Holy Grail evoked by your questions above? I knew enough about ethnocentrism to have strong reservations about anything resembling yet another Enlightenment project intended to bring a universal political culture to the world's benighted masses. I wondered: What are the necessary links between one's political culture and the rest of the culture that one lives in? How can one choose between the competing claims of any proposed new political culture and those of any existing culture? Who can legitimately make such choices? The Left has tended to settle such questions impatiently, without much reflection, by reference to supposedly universal principles of Marxism (once thought by many, and still by some, to be an "exact science") or of the French Enlightenment, or more often, by instinct ("I personally can't accept..."), which amounts to the same thing. Any political culture that doesn't correspond to those principles therefore appears backward and, it is thought, should be consigned to the dustbin of history. I decided not to look any further for any sort of "shared horizon" until I had carefully studied a non-Western culture, in its political and other aspects, in some depth. I studied Arabic, and a year ago I began an extended period of study in the Middle East. I have learnt a great deal here and hope to learn a great deal more. I don't have answers to the questions I asked above, but I'm more convinced than ever that these are hard and important questions, not to be brushed aside in any premature rush towards an imagined universalism. I don't think politics can be separated from culture. The British House of Commons, European anarchist working groups, and the deliberations among the heads of clans in Upper Egypt all have their distinctive cultures. Perhaps you are right, Brian, that tomorrow's social movements need a new shared horizon as the basis for international cooperation. But even if that's true, let it not be a totalitarian horizon, one that attempts to cast all political life in the same mould. Let it be one that allows individuals and groups to move freely among political cultures and to mediate between them. Ben # 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