Brian Holmes on Wed, 15 Jul 2020 09:40:06 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> "Consume revolutionary media" |
Thanks to all those who answered my questions, both onlist and off. I want to answer Prem right now, and Max a bit later. Since media is about looking and listening, Prem, I was glad to listen to your podcast interview, a compelling voyage through your life, your sensibility, and what seems to be a socially complex and multiple architectural practice involving lots of reflection on Indian national life. As well as some comments about international norms and trends - what a journey! There is a point where you bring up the issue of informality - meaning, forms of labor and more broadly of life that are not integrated to the registers and regulations of the modernizing state. You note that this category covers over 80% of people living in India. Speaking as an architect, you say that "in situations where they are given security of [land] tenure, and where they can incrementally build and improve their house over a long period of time, they produce fairly decent quality housing, which is far better than professionally delivered solutions." That remark expresses a critical relation to your own profession, but above all, it's what you're calling a metaphor of hope. Here, the major issue that has come out of the recent social movements is, how can communities empower themselves to take care of each other, in ways that don't require the protection - or permit the violent interference - of increasingly brutal police? So that has a lot to do with what you recommend: "Shift from overriding emphasis on the vertical axis between citizen and state, and build constituencies through the lateral connection between citizens." It's happening - and in my experience of a much more formalized and overly modernized country, it happens a lot more during periods of so-called unrest and insurgency, which are really just about life breaking out all over the place. It's interesting that you end up talking a fair bit about the relation to the state nonetheless, but you do it to ask how the lateral relations between people could be either empowered, or simply left to flourish, depending on the case. This is a lot different than just get the state off our backs (neoliberal slogan) or smash the state (anarchy). To empower is subtle, because it means both to give, and to give some room, to not impose, to avoid control. To let flourish at respectful distance, in our time of vampire corporations and strongman states, is surely the most important thing. You talk about getting rid of neoliberalism - I'd say, not just because it turns everything into a market, but because in those markets, toxic production is rammed down everyone's throats. It's bad food, it's poisoned entertainment, it's industrial waste, it's climate change, and sometimes - or very often, depending on who and where you are - it's just a bulldozer. Gentrification is a sophisticated form of dispossession in the US and probably in India too, but things like the fossil-fuel industry are just as brutal here as anywhere, a literal bulldozer with its exhaust pipe of ecological destruction. You are totally right, Prem, that a vertical relation between citizen and state can do nothing about that - it's obvious, the citizen is pinned to the wall like an insect, when not just trampled by the corporate state. The question is, can horizontal relations among people generate both the metaphors of hope, and the actual power, to change that kind of relation? Thanks to, well, let's call it revolutionary media, I have realized that in the city of Chicago where I live, some people want to take the literal production of power - electric power in this case - back from the corporations, in order to eliminate its most toxic forms and diversify all the rest into a new kind of grid (https://www.demcomed.org). To my way of seeing, this kind of effort is on a similar level as the calls to defund the police. It's happening through a proliferation of relations between people who are able to care about things that are in no way abstract, but just situated at scales that are not directly accessible to isolated individuals. Today the solar panels on my roof are just an isolated gnat in the open maw of the electric utility. As long as the grid they're connected to is run by a monopoly corporation, they are just a fantasy of change, a true utopia (no-place). It takes a socially complex and radically multiple civil society to build another world. I want to dream of and move toward a lighter, more intricate, more diverse and more sharable kind of real and situated power - one that would still permit these great conversations that we sometimes have to flourish. all the very best, Brian On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 8:40 AM Prem Chandavarkar <prem.cnt@gmail.com> wrote: > Brian, > I was on this podcast some weeks ago and will repeat something I said > there. > > https://www.architecturetalk.org/home/73-jyaga-sa9ls-6wtny-6wgg5-4mgza-kdpel-3rn64-nrbkb-2lpnb <...> # 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: