Re: <nettime> Identity and difference

On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 7:10 AM Brett Scott <brettscott@fastmail.com> wrote:

I know you guys are all riled up, but it would be worth chilling out. As a reader of this thread I'd like to point out that nobody has either 'won' or 'lost' it, but the degeneration in the tone is a classic side-effect of the echoing ping-pong of faceless digital communication where the signal gets more and more distorted. Can the participants please take a deep breath, have a walk, acknowledge each other's unique humanity, and then maybe meet in a pub to actually have a civil conversation. If there is anything we know, it's that nobody gets anywhere in this movement by treating each other like enemies

Cheers,
Brett
@suitpossum

On 28/10/2018 10:04, Alexander Bard wrote:
Hahahaha, and there comes the Rousseuian personal attack. Exactly my point.

There are apparently people so evil and dangerous that the mere mentioning of their names disqualifies the mentioner from any further attachment. See Ian's outburst below. Are the gallows what await me next?

While I thought Nettime was s forum for grown-ups - in which case separating person and opinion (meaning Nelson Mandela may be wrong and Adolf Hitler may be right on details) - is a fundamental requirement, Ian wants this to be a kindergarden faux discussion forum for the good children isolating themselves against the evil children on the outside. Superiority versus inferiority in the moralist struggle. Sooo Rousseauian. And exactly what is so fundamentally pathologiocal and infantile with identity politics. What could possibly be a more Rousseuian attitude than that?

I happily dine with everybody and anybody without becoming them. As my great dad taught me when I was five years old. And if The Left may not even listen to and learn from Candace Owens, Nick Land and/or Adolf Hitler for that matter, then whatever that Left is, deserves to die its current slow death into total irrelevance. It is not a proletarian left at all, it's just a church lady left.

But I'm all for The New Left. A return to Freud and Marx. And I'm happy my message in a bottle in this forum worked big time considering how many offlist new amazing contacts my postings created. Nettime is still very much alive (thank the God who does not exist) even if not on the mailing list itself.

And Ian, our dear historian of identitarianism Asad Haider will never attract any masses. Because he again does not have a narrative to attract anybody. Except possibly for the eternal self-victims that Marx so grandly despised.

Thank you, everybody!

Alexander Bard

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 23:46 skrev Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com>:

"Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days, race does not exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely a rough but not fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of tribal contribution."

What a strikingly ahistorical, antimaterialist, and ideological statement. Anyone who finds Candace Owens and Nick Land salvageable deserves no attention, and certainly no serious consideration or dialogue. Best of luck with your fantasy of a pure universal class which exists only for itself as an abstraction thoroughly divorced from reality.

On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 5:34 PM Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ian

It's great that you bring up Asad Haider because he is a brilliant historian of identity politics and I agree with him that the big shift happened in 1977. But while for Haider 1977 meant a deepening of emancipatory struggle to include feminist and anti-racist minoritarian causes that he insists were ignored prior to then, I disagree and mean that this shift was rather an ideological turn away from Marx straight into the arms of Rousseau and no deepening at all but rather a massive loss. The preoccupation became one of medial attention (the attentionalist call for "has everybody been seen and heard" rather than the socialist call for "has everybody been given the means and resources toward equal opportunity") instead of class struggle proper and has remained so ever since.

Once this dramatic shift of "leftist activism" met with postmodernism's hatred of the grand narrative as idea (which I as a Hegelian insist is in itself just another form of subconscious grand narrative) we ended up with the mess we have today. Laclau's and Mouffe's hegemonic race to the bottom. Specialized subcultural struggles "within" rather than "away from" victimhood with no clear vision in sight. Meanwhile that clear goal will always be lacking unless there is a grand heroic narrative that connects the struggles and lifts up its participants to a tribal and today also hopefully global whole.

My work is therefore all about tribal anthropology instead (tribes in Greenland, Botswana, New Guinea and China are all alike) now moving into data anthropology about contemporary humans to build a universal story of the tribe in all its variety and diversity. This is the return to Marx that I insist on. Like charismatic Candace Owens says on Fox News these days, race does not exist to her. Neither does it to me. And gender is merely a rough but not fixed orientation toward dividual archetypes of tribal contribution. Without any Rousseuian fantasies allowed on any levels.

Because only class is class and only class har universal validity. Laclau's and Zizek's dream of the particular personifying the universal was never more than a wordgame anyway. It is through shared vision (a fetish as opposed to an abject) that we can find a shared agenda. Not by distributing medial attention according to ultimately infantile needs. Because that's no better than Trump himself.

Best intentions

Alexander Bard

Den lör 27 okt. 2018 kl 21:27 skrev Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com>:

If you you think being of critical and suspicious of theological metanarratives is intellectually lazy, wait until you hear about faux-Marxist class reductionism!

In all seriousness, for those of you looking for actually useful analyses of the complex relations between identity, class, and emancipation, you couldn't do much better than Asad Haider's recently published "Mistaken Identity" ( https://www.versobooks.com/books/2716-mistaken-identity ), which draws on the history of black radicalism to arrive at some truly exciting answers.

~i

On Sat, Oct 27, 2018 at 12:06 PM Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com> wrote:

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

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