Re: <nettime> Identity and difference

Dear Joseph

While you resentfully remain obsessed with my tonality and my etiquette (as if this was some smelling salt-driven cocktail party at a ship doomed to sink) I do prefer to stay with the topic I brought up.

Forget about me. Ans forget about Joseph's preoccupation with my style and whatever bitter personal vendettas he is projecting, I'm into the topic of what the left might or could be. And with postmodernists ringing alarm bells at any attempt at creating a grand narrative while the world is on fire, may I ask, is this all you can achieve? What is that if not the most mortidinal, death- and tit-worshipping pathetic anti-narrative there ever was?

It's very comfortable to say "I don't know" but as far as I'm concerned the answer - while pretending to be cautiously honest - reveals nothing but ignorance and intellectual laziness.

However it is easy to see where it all comes from, this so called "left" has returned to the comforts of Rousseau's kindergarden fantasies and is more preoccupied with keeping academic tenure, posing with the correct virtues, than with fostering and mentoring a new generation of leftist radicals focused on the potential of open source platforms toward a collaborative collective intelligence. The project that should be and still could be the genuine leftism of the 21st century. The rest you can read in my books "Syntheism" and "Digital Libido". Yes, the first one is about Intelligence becoming God and the second one is on how we still underrate Hegel and Freud when trying to understand our current predicament. But it's all forward-looking and grand narrative-building. As this is what we need today.

Oh, a great many thanks for the offlist endorsements I have received the last three days from Nettime members. However if those endorsements end up in my private mailbox rather than on Nettime itself, then perhaps this mailing list is better suited for some kind of nostalgia for the pre-Trump era or something? I have that still to figure out. I personally prefer to looking forward and solving deadlocks. But no prestige.

Deleuze genuinely mixed Nietzsche and Marx, he was an absolutely heroic philosopher. Totally opposed to Rousseau. So what do you think Deleuze would have thought of today's social media-driven victimhood obsessions? Yes, I miss Nick Land here. We are close these days.

Best intentions and utmost humility

Alexander

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 14:24 skrev Joseph Rabie <joe@overmydeadbody.org>:

Alexander addresses me with an injunction and second-guesses my answer: "What is your tactic? Further excuses for not dealing with the crisis of the left?"

My answer is that I do not have the slightest idea, and that anyone who claims to have one is either a liar, fool, or utopian dictator. And insofar as utopian dictatorship is concerned, Alexander espouses a "politico-theological project", a title that has all my alarm bells going.

Indeed, Alexander reduces the complexity of the world to a sterile, doctrinal dialectic that denies the sophistication of reality.

I regret being so disobliging, but in my opinion Alexander's prose is intellectual, political and literary logorrhoea, in no way conducive to dealing constructively with the issues at hand.

Joseph Rabie.

Le 26 oct. 2018 à 20:33, Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com> a écrit :

Dear Joseph

Yes, I said I made a grotesque simplification. That was my point. What else is new? Have I claimed anything else?
If we don't start to see the difference between a victimhood-driven and a hero-driven left, then how are we going to spot our own weaknesses? Where do you start yourself?
Because I'm one of many many leftists who return to Marx these days since Identity Politics has become nothing but an endless tirade of complaints with no creative solutions or constructive routes up and out in sight. It really is Rousseau and his tabula rasa idea of humanity all over again. Moralism instead of pragmatism. And it has been growing since the 1970's and now dominates whatever leftist social media we still have.
That's not Marxism. That's a parody of Marxism. Celebrating the lumpen proletariat instead of heading directly for what proletarian heroism could be in the 21st century. No wonder that 95% of social crowdfunding goes into the pockets of the libertarian right these days. Leftists do not even support each other any longer. At least not for more than three days.
What is your own answer? What ties us together? Only banal hatred of Trump, or a true vision for the future, a genuine politico-theological project that get people going?
Sometimes simplifications do the job. What is your tactic? Further excuses for not dealing with the crisis of the left?

Best intentions
Alexander Bard