Ian Alan Paul on Sun, 5 Feb 2017 18:15:57 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump + 10 Preliminary Theses on |
Hello Sebastian, Thank you for these thoughtful responses. I'll try to sketch of few responses quickly, which will in some way remain unsatisfactory I'm sure but nonetheless may clarify a few things. "Re 1: Resistance against Trump has already become manifest, not as radical acts of negation, but as diffuse articulations of discontent. The resistance is in the streets already, attracted not by pure negativity, but by Facebook events. That's the "gasoline for the fires to come" (and can we update that metaphor for the 21st century, please?)" I would resist the conclusion that facebook / social media has much to do with what we've been seeing at airports over the weekend, or at UC Berkeley yesterday evening ( [1]http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Protesters-storm-Milo-Yiannopoulo s-event-at-UC-10901829.php ). This is an open question of course, but I do think that the rush of media theorists to look at protests as being manifestations of social media posts has deeply clouded analyses in the recent past (looking at the movements of the squares, for example), just as I think it does with how people are thinking about Trump today (as a product of memes). There's certainly a relation, but I don't think it's a causal one. "Re 3: There is an inflationary tendency at work here: "an infinite number of other techniques" is already too many, and as "an infinite number of other techniques known and unknown", they become entirely meaningless. Even an appeal to all particles in the Universe, known and unknown, to resonate with the resistance against Trump, would have a finite number of addressees." I meant to use infinite here in a precise sense, and not as it's colloquially used. So instead of describing something "very large" I meant to simply say that these are sets of techniques that are "not finite / without limits." I also think the "unknown" part is particularly important politically in this moment. "Re 4: I'm vaguely aware of how historians and philosophers have, in the latter half of the 20th century, attempted to locate the notion and frame the question of "power". It's always good to try something new, but here, the use of that concept seems more like a regression. I always thought statements like "power is most intimately known by those who have lived their lives beneath it" were no longer possible, and that "those who have historically been most affected by power" no longer "populate our fantasies." I'm mobilizing a Spinozist sense of power here, which is centered on affect. I think this is a useful approach because it allows us to differentiate between forms and intensities of power, and to examine the historicity and specificity of power relations, rather than revert to the position of "power is uniform and everywhere" as bad readers of Foucault often do. "Re 5: "As lines of riot police and make-shift barricades cut the world into a billion different sides", I have difficulties tracing the very geometry of that phenomenon. "Which one will you stand on?" Statistically speaking: nowhere near any of the edges, and most likely alone. And when "ultimately", we wipe the board clean, and a single "line will be drawn between those who currently (or seek to) govern, and those who desire to be and insist upon being ungovernable", then can we please also drill a hole for those who insist that becoming ungovernable contradicts the very notion of drawing such a line?" This point, along with #8, were drawing on Pierre Clastres work (as read through Deleuze and Guattari), and the line is meant to invoke the ineradicability of power, as well as its topological/differential dimension. If drilling a hole and going subterranean is your way of describing that dynamic, I don't think I would necessarily disagree, although perhaps that puts us more in the imagery of Marx's revolutionary mole, digging and digging underground until it's finally ready to resurface. "Re 9: I don't think anyone doubts that "the crisis has already arrived", and that it arrived around the same time when the idea that there is "no possibility of rolling back time" was elevated from wild guess to scientific fact, or when the observation that "the sheer entropy of the present means that there is little to hold on to" was reformulated as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The crisis is old news, really. What worries me more, however, is that the above is then immediately followed by the prediction that "watching the world around us rise and fall at an accelerating rate, those who prevail will be those who grasp the risks worth taking", because I can't shake off the feeling that I have read that before, even though I cannot remember where. Is this still Kevin Kelly, or already Peter Thiel?" I'm one of those people who refuse to allow speculation / disruption to be branded, captured, and owned by capitalists. Another name for this is Deleuze's deterritorialization, and I would say that it is more of a question of political form than political content. Regarding the commentary on Egypt ~ all of those insights are very close to home. I lived in Cairo for a year immediately following the coup / counterrevolution in 2013 and so am very intimate with the ongoing history of the uprising ( I won't have time to go in depth here, but if you're interested you can follow up with my project on the subject: [2]www.ConditionsOfPossibility.com ). Of course, living and teaching in the West Bank at the moment deeply informs my current positions as well. I decided to deliberately label these two texts as "Preliminary" (in the sense that more will need to be written) and "Theses" (in the sense that they will have to be tested). Only time will tell what unfolds from here but I hope that at least some fragments of either piece can be put to good use. All of the best, ~i ________________________________ Dr. Ian Alan Paul Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences Abu Dis, Palestine [3]www.ianalanpaul.com "History is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated." -Edward Said On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 10:31 AM, <[4]sebastian@rolux.org> wrote: When I saw the "10 Preliminary Theses on Trump", what made me feel uneasy was, mostly, a matter of form: that the "10 Theses" format seemed strangely anachronistic, inadequate for a phenomenon like Trump, and that of all the attributes one could have possibly picked, "preliminary" looked like the least appropriate choice for something written in late January 2017. The most famous (and most famously wrong) "N Preliminary Theses on Trump" text, Nate Silver's "Donald Trump's Six Stages of Doom" (1), was published in August 2015, and that was the time when it was still possible -- reasonable, as Nate Silver would argue -- to think that "preliminary" might do. That has changed. Reading the "10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance", I'm sure that each of them is built around a kernel of truth, but I found it hard to get through the coating. To me, they sound overly romantic in the best case, and ring like pure kitsch in the worst. Romanticism may have its place in political critique, but here, it seems to come at the cost of making actual observations, at the expense of material reality, and how stuff in it actually works. <...> # 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: