Despair is conceived as the sickness, not the cure.-- Soren Kierkegaard
The British are having an election and the question is does anyone care? Do the Brits even care? It is an election which well represents the great existential crisis of Western politics. Europe and America have no real politics. Our elections are just another aspect of consumer society, a choice between Coke or Pepsi, personality as packaging. All platforms are indistinguishable variations on the status quo. No variation can garner great support for change, because they offer no change. Instead of engaging the challenges of our times, our politics are the equivalent of Xanax. Despair is our politics.
Mark Ames has a really brilliant piece on financial matters. It is both funny and infuriating, hitting a perfect note on what's wrong with our politics -- a refusal to engage reality and the pure decadence of established power. A deeper representation is the oil spill gently beginning to lap the shores of the Gulf. Two weeks ago, the politics of despair announced we were opening drilling off the East Coast, continuing a now three decades aversion to confronting the realities of America's oil addiction. In the end, the politics of despair results in only one thing, death.
The answer to political despair is to engage political life. Rage is many times the first step, yet it needs to be accompanied by wisdom, an appreciation of wondrous life. If not, it leads to the lashing out we now witness in Arizona. The answer to political despair is not political faith, but political life. In response to the politics of despair and its Xanax peddlers, try Roy Batty's answer in Blade Runner, "More life, fucker."
Mark Ames has a really brilliant piece on financial matters. It is both funny and infuriating, hitting a perfect note on what's wrong with our politics -- a refusal to engage reality and the pure decadence of established power. A deeper representation is the oil spill gently beginning to lap the shores of the Gulf. Two weeks ago, the politics of despair announced we were opening drilling off the East Coast, continuing a now three decades aversion to confronting the realities of America's oil addiction. In the end, the politics of despair results in only one thing, death.
The answer to political despair is to engage political life. Rage is many times the first step, yet it needs to be accompanied by wisdom, an appreciation of wondrous life. If not, it leads to the lashing out we now witness in Arizona. The answer to political despair is not political faith, but political life. In response to the politics of despair and its Xanax peddlers, try Roy Batty's answer in Blade Runner, "More life, fucker."
Ames' piece is funny, but essentially valueless, which is to say that his friend's line is pure bs. In a revolution many things are destroyed, and there is a vacuum. Success is contingent upon the construction of a new order. In the case of the US socio-economy, some kind of orderly, rational, well-planned and organized revolution is certainly in order; and yes it would destroy by necessity all of the ponzi racketeering ecology. Something else would have to be constructed to take its place.
ReplyDelete'Revolution' from the bottom? No. Lacking in technocratic skilz. From the top? No. Hopelessly vapid, corrupt, degenerate, and scarcely more educated than the slave class, in spite of credentials-whatever. It's the middle circle that needs organizational development and given that could pull it off. Organizational/community(intellectual/technocratic) probably over the web; probably something like GoogleWave type architecture, as blogging architecture has served provisionally over the last decade but lacks the ___ whatever to bring things to the next level. Academia might serve, if it were revitalized and emancipated from its corporate/state/cryptocratic infiltration and subsumption into that order.
Don't destroy until you have something with which to fill the vacuum. I think that may be large part of the reason there hasn't been much movement yet. No one has been able to get around to writing the playbook. There is quite a bit of support for it though.
I wouldnt say Ames peice is useless. I agree with much of what else you write, however, history doesn't wait for playbooks, events are in the saddle.
ReplyDeleteyeah Ames is fun to read, eXiled is good.
ReplyDeletesome Notes:
I started writing a response to the above comment but it got over-involved and then realized you might be somewhat joking anyway. anyways your syllogism is false, obviously, as it implies the exclusivity of planned action and unexpected occasions, of composed music with creative interpretation/improvisation, etc...
While mythopoetic vagaries can be entertaining, I was going for the bureaucratic/technocratic (operational paradigm --> 'playbook' is a contingency algorithm essentially) mode, which is rigorous/scientific by necessity. The sad state of the social sciences and civic discourse notwithstanding...
Whenever anyone brings up 'history' as a teleologically active presence I get sour feeling...
Practical point (wrt the web organisation proposal and generation of 'playbook') being 'we' or people or whatever should be (with suitable clarity, precision, rigor) developing scenario builds and actual policy prescriptions, much as a competent thinktank ought to, but of course doing so in an open-source manner, distributed like, distributed over the web. When people are developing actual executable policy packages in a collaborative and open manner over the web in not-very-different a way than Linux programmers develop a kernel or GNU apps, then at that point we might see substantial political shifts take place. The will is there but no one will jump on it until they are satisfied that there is at least a program ready, so it won't be total automatic chaos. If you want historical parallels they shouldn't be too hard to find. Automatically thinking of 1760s-1790s America, house party intellectuals on (if Pynchon has it down) Indian tea & hashish going into it pretty much explicitly; those people could write! like in fucking PRECISE DETAIL (they were hyper-analytic, hyper-Rationalist, which is the rigor of Science par excellence), whereas my brain (and even most of those of people I respect) is so polluted by by this marketing slogan / soundbyte lingustic culture it's become almost impossible to think in anything other than a string of disconnected and hideous cliches. Rather than being rigorous and comprehensive, say...
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ReplyDeleteIt would be nice if the Linux people were involved in doing more social-networking software engineering...
alphas, betas, executables. Algorithms, programs 'playbooks'. Operational paradigm, essentially the same... Thinktank, but distributed, essentially the democracy/republic reconstituted by web-participation of intellects and technicals.
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Deeper philosophically issues of methodology: I have well-developed but not conclusive opinions on the subject which are contextually pertinent but won't go into since not really clear what or how to summarize into abstract. One reason I refused (with consequences from ) to go into history is that I find it a confused and lax discipline, in spite of the many historians I respect. It's a methodological thing, and not at all intractible, but it takes some explaining. That I could summarize as: (under the tripartite Deleuzean rubric where intellecutal activity is partitioned into Art, Philosophy, and Science), historians typically course through all three without necessarily making (almost never) making the modal gear changes effectively. So, you could do history as a social Science, tracing states-of-affairs under some nominally static formal ontological discursive system. It can be done in an artistic narrative mode over a plane of sensation and perception, maybe mythopoetics veering into philosophical appreciation of the Event, conceptual play in an intuitive plane of immanence. What happened all at once... Deleuze is really big on the irreducibility of concepts to propositions, implying the irreducibility of what he calls philosophy to science, both of which he defines precisely. I find this very remarkable and important, especially with respect to methodological orientation in the social-sciences/engineering situation these days. but must. stop. writing. now.