Alexander Bard on Mon, 29 Feb 2016 11:13:34 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Return of the F-scale - and How to Respond |
Well, while ageering 100% with Brian's excellent analysis, sorry for having said this all along, but in a time when any revolutionary outburst in the streets is either crushed by military inteligence within weeks (from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square) or, even worse, turned into a t-shirt on some instagram snap shots within three days, and then deservedly ignored and forgotten about for its narcissistic naivety (most likely with an "Occupy" prefix and some commercial plaza suffix), the only possible as well as necessary response to the current predicament is, take a deep breath, a s-p-i-r-i-t-u-a-l revolution. Simon Critchley argues for this in his "The Faith of The Faithless", Robert Mangabeira Unger argues for this in his "The Religion of The Future", I and Jan Söderqvist argue for this, with a digital twist that ought to be of special interest to Nettime members (yes I happily advice and support Wikileaks, Snowden, the Pirates et al), in our book "Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age". Maybe if and when Slavoj Zizek really takes his fascination with St Paul seriously in his otherwise excellent hybridisation of Hegel and Lacan will leftist folks finally start to listen. To summarise the Critchley-Unger-Bard stance: If you really want to kick a global empire out of its tracks - especially with its current rapid hypercapitalist descent into elected autoritarianism, the Freudian mortido is a mighty beast to kill - you need to go all the way back to the first rather than just the tragically missed 20th century for inspiration. No matter how many encrypted twitter channels you make available and Lenin speech podiums you raise, street protests will only look more and more like compulsive repetitive behaviour, as if sponsored by H&M, than real change. That is unless they are accompanied with a new radically leftist spiritual approach to politics. Because other approach is not just doomed to fail (due to its lack of utopian drive) but is also nothing more than Nietzsche's despised slave mentality in its own authoritarian form, as Julia Kristeva so rightly has pointed out when attacking the current pointless leftist obsession with banal identity politics (Zizek basically says the same thing, Kristeva as a more couragoeus woman only so ore bluntly). Empty dystopianism (as in constantly shouting "resistance" against evering and everybody) does not work, never worked, never will work. Merely grunting is too easy, too lazy, too naive. Utopianism requires a master mentality to begin with. And the work which that in turn requires. Monastries prior to molotov cocktails. So, will you listen? I know you all hate to go there with your Marxist blindfolds and nation-state anti-globalist nostalgia, but the unnameable word here is "spirituality" and its exercise is called - tah dah - political theology. Because what we are witnessing here is merely the death of the latest of the gods, the communist utopia. Donald Trump is consequently just the finale, or the beginning of the finale, of what started in 1989. We need to provide people with a new utopia and we have to move quickly to do so. S-p-i-r-i-t-u-a-l-i-t-y, folks! Feel free to begin with the above reading list. Then at least I am all open for discussion. Why not as a Google Hangout Session at The New Centre for Research & Practice in early April? We could arrange that. It's a start. That is, if you're seriously interested in solving this megapuzzle. Or else, we can all just sit and grunt ourselves into oblivion on a mailing list. The choice is yours. Best intentions, for all, seriously Alexander Bard 2016-02-28 15:59 GMT+01:00 Geert Lovink <geert@desk.nl>: > This is so true, so goddamned true, 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: