Re: <nettime> Crisis 2.0 - the political turn

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 01/11/2015 10:55 AM, sebastian@rolux.org wrote:

> A Bayesian would probably bet against the future of Democracy in Europe
> by now. Especially given the fact there is such a strong prior.
>
> But what's to be done as a Marxist, in the broadest possible sense?
> Critique, for sure (the "full recognition of the quagmire"). But a
> revolution in Europe (or at least a "real political turn")? Not
> everything that is hard to imagine can be ruled out, especially if you're
> able to influence the outcome yourself. But my feeling is that our era's
> reasoning has long become Bayesian, and that it has become harder to
> insist on demanding the impossible.

Sebastian, your post is thoughtful and bitterly incisive. I think we 
kind of understand each other. I would like to up the ante a little.

"Demanding the impossible," "storming heaven" and that kind of rhetoric 
is, in my view, exactly what has produced the Joschka Fischers of the 
world, who fall from the heights of utopia into total identification 
with the eternal and untouchable status quo. In fact they have moved 
from one form of denialism to another.

You're right, present-day normative establishment thinking is thoroughly 
probabilistic. It's based on regression analysis, which means 
establishing the trajectory of some dependent variable within previous 
statistical records, then extrapolating forward into the future. Like 
any real event (9-11 for instance), the financial crash of 2008 
represents a breakdown of this system. It's a particularly significant 
breakdown because contemporary computerized finance, which has become 
the leading technology of global governance, is founded entirely on 
regression analysis.

To "demand the impossible" is to ask, rightly, for a break in the 
predictable. It's the strategy of the critical utopia. What I'm saying 
is that the break is already here. You don't have to ask for it but just 
struggle to perceive it against the grain. It is the triple crisis of 
the present, which has been produced by thirty years of neoliberal 
informationalism:

- First, democratic citizenship in the former first world countries has 
broken under the pressure of inequality, resulting (among others) in the 
political fracture of the EU between north and south.
- Second, the Trilateral world order has split apart into a chaotically 
evolving multipolar complex (which at this point, and not only because 
of phenomena like ISIS, cannot even be called a "system").
- Third, the planetary ecology has entered a process of rapid 
metamorphosis due to the tremendous new injection of atmospheric carbon 
that followed the 1990s boom.

All of us who became globally conscious through the use of the Internet 
demanded the impossible. We demanded to consume the world in a flash of 
electricity. Or rather we responded, each with our own forms of 
resistance, to an injunction far more powerful than ourselves, and we 
participated in this world-consuming process.

In my post I wanted to say two things. First, there is now a real threat 
of full-scale war in the chaotic multipolar power complex (a threat that 
is being lived out as a kind of anticipatory simulacrum in France right 
now, with thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets). Second, this 
dramatic rehearsal for war risks entirely diverting our collective 
political attention from the accelerating process of climate change that 
now constitutes our human horizon, in every sense of that last word.

Meanwhile, on the ground, very close to us, the rupture in continuity 
that explodes every norm of the neoliberal world has already happened. 
It's the breakdown of egalitarian citizenship. This is the third thing, 
the absence of democracy, the gaping hole. Undoubtedly, for those of us 
who restlessly consume the world, it is the fundamental locus of our own 
situated blindness. In the EU, this largely silent drama has been given 
a face by the egalitarian mobilizations of Greece and of Spain, where, 
as Eric rightly points out, political experiments are underway and are 
struggling to reach a European stage.

In my view, the issue is not about demanding the impossible. It's about 
finding ways to participate in the massive ruptures of probablity that 
define the present as the tangibly uncertain, the open horizon. To 
participate, for an intellectual, is to analyze and express the current 
situation, not on the basis of predictions, but on the basis of changes 
that are already underway. And that's not apocalyptic thinking, to 
respond to some objections that David Garcia has thoughtfully made. 
Disaster, as Blanchot once tried to point out, is when the stars ("les 
astres") fall down to earth, and you can actually touch your own destiny.

Unfortunately, the figures of an ancient religious conflict or clash of 
civilizations have been effective at closing this human horizon, and 
transforming or restranscendentalizing the experience of our mortality 
into something eternal and untouchable that can be securitized by the 
army. I guess that in your terms, Sebastian, this would be the last 
stand of the Bayesians. I don't think it's going to last very long, 
actually.

thanks for your post, 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: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org