Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

Andreas asked (and Eric, Oliver and Brian offer plans for) how 'politics' (my word, not his) can work, practically. Offline I admitted that our ill-timed move to Australia means I'm as bad a person to reply as anyone could be but...

On the question of who can speak: when a hundred whales strand themselves. - commit group suicide - there are two or three possible causes: deep ocean sonar activity, typically military but sometimes natural deep ocean earthquakes (but none recently near the Chathams) or chasing food, typically travelling on currents of, in this case, cold water, set up by new seasonal conditions due to glacial melt. If a hundred migrants threw themselves onto a beach to die we should respond, whether we speak their language or not. Whale beachings speak. to us - it's just that we aren't listening. (Wittgenstein was wrong to say 'If a lion could speak, we would not understand him: lions do speak - we choose to ignore them)

On technology: step1: Grundrisse, the 'Fragment on machines': machinery is the congealed form of skills extracted from workers and turned into factories, ie 'dead labour', now owned by the factory boss and turned into an instrument of discipline over the workers.  Step 2: any attempt to get round that discipline and reduce the burden of labour  becomes the property of the bosses too, is added to the machinery and its organisation; step 3: as Andreas has also pointed out, include here natural languages, maths etcetera - all culture is the congealed form of the knowledge and skills, as is institutional organisation; step 4: when I talked about this 15 years  ago with the Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay he replied, that's the problem with you pakeha: you don't know the names of your ancestors.

Technologies of every kind are the black boxes where we keep our ancestors locked up

Learning  from indigenous (and ancient folklore across Eurasia about djinns, fairies, dragons, dryads...)): what we call 'nature'  - mountains, rivers, trees as Brian just reminded us - are packed with life, and tho I prefer the word 'mediating' they communicate  - and as natural creatures who eat, breath and shit like anything else, we're part of that mediating/communicating ecology -- what we call nature is the domain of gods

to add another layer to Brian's delirium: a politics of gods and ancestors

Corporate capital (and its antecedent montheisms) has diminished, repressed and locked up our gods and ancestors for too long, "I love my fellow man" wrote Tolstoy " i would do anything to help him, anything at all -- except get off his back"

First step of a new politics: stop riding on the backs of gods and ancestors. History demonstrates that the longer we treat them as dumb animals that deserve to be ridden, the worse this gets

Sean

PS [ a small issue but -- monarch comes from mono-archos: rule by one.; an-archos is no rule (like the difference between aesthetic and anaesthetic) - no-rule tends to privilege the wealth/powerful: there's probably a Greek word for that too, but tyranny of the rich is a reasonable one - that's why they mock 1968 on one side of their faces and repeat it - this time as tragedy - with the other]

---

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Thoughts on coups (John Young)
   2. Re: [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups (Brian Holmes)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 09:32:59 -0500
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
To: <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Thoughts on coups
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An-archism vs. mon-archism, many vs. few,
------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:13:28 -0600
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
To: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> [EXT] Re: Thoughts on coups
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On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 6:20 PM Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:

The unthinkable has to be thought.
>

That's exactly it. I like this discussion. It's fascinating how the ideas
spring up like mushrooms. I especially like Oliver's call for all the
approaches that people might be experimenting with - aesthetic,
philosophical, activist, computational, whatever angle is calling you.
Things are falling apart. It's a time when you can have new ideas - you can
become something different. An animal, maybe.

Eric, I'm with you, it's possible to work on two levels at once, radical
transformation AND a more beneficial social order. This means facing up to
some extreme contradictions. In the US, we just looked straight down the
barrel of a coup. There's no way to love it. There's a sense across the
left that some kind of workable order has to be restored - people are going
hungry in the richest country on earth - but at the same time, the incoming
Biden government has "restoration" written all over it. Maybe not in the
worst way, but the best way is still terrible, whether it's patching up the
international alliance system or the domestic airline/oil/agribusiness
complex, real-estate speculation, education fraud, etc etc etc. We're faced
with a huge hangover of the same old garbage, but we can no longer preach
revolution and chaos because it plays into the hands of a literally
murderous right. So what to do? How do counter-systemic movements take on
the role of loyal opposition? It's a total contradiction. It's unthinkable.
It has to be done.

Let me take that just a little further.

At the deepest level, and in the direction that Oliver's going, what I see
emerging in the Americas is a terrestrial cosmology. This is the opposite
of a Cartesian mathematical universe oriented toward spatial infinity. It's
got everything to do with Gaia theory and the circular causality of
cybernetics (especially the Bateson variety) but don't fool yourself with
such concepts, because people don't experience it that way. They experience
it as listening to the voices and following the actions of indigenous
people. They/we experience it as an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and
a need for mutual aid, more true to the present than any theory could be.
Like any religious or messianic dimension, this terrestrial cosmology has
nothing to do with the state. It's about water. It's about heartbeat. It's
about murder. It's about responding to the threat of violence through the
exposure of your own fragile flesh. People can see society going down - and
they can feel the Holocene ending, whether they use fancy words or not. The
principles of the commons are based on those feelings. So is the solidarity
of the excluded. These telluric movements are going to grow, that's a good
thing. But green nationalism and ecofascism, those things will grow too.
Can you be messianic and practical all at once? I think you have to be. The
time demands it.

Andreas wants to know, are the trees and the whales really going to speak
in their own voice? Do trees have standing in the courts? The short answer
is obviously no. People speak for them, that's what every case of the
rights of nature and river personhood has already recorded (you know there
have been a number of those, right Andreas?). But the long answer is
different. Protesters start to surround the courthouses, like stands of
trees, and with stands of trees, if there are any. A new sense of what's
right and wrong, what's bearable and unbearable, puts down roots and shoots
up shoots, and people get shot by the cops and others go off listening to
the voices of the whales and society changes, right down to the laws and
the computer codes and even the sense of property ownership, which is the
bedrock of capitalism. Root breaks stone. The commons is a crack in
possessive individualism. A hugely popular novel, The Overstory, is about
exactly that. Messianic ideas emerge out of disaster. Well, we're in a
disaster now. It means the stars fall to earth, it's raining asteroids.
That's how stuff changes.

It's gonna go fast y'all, so get ready. I use geoengineering as a proxy for
everything coming down the pipe that's currently unthinkable. It's
scandalous because it's all too real, and all too close, tomorrow. A 2C
temperature rise is incredibly destructive, and geoengineering is
relatively cheap:  you can be sure some state or even non-state actor will
try it. Wake up my friends, that 2C world is already baked in, so think it
for a change! An eco-state is an opportunity to do the unthinkable, before
somebody else does it to you. And it's also a time to stop the worst, to
stop the nightmare stuff that's totally predictable already. Sean has given
a good rundown of a lot of it, already happening for the most part. Exactly
because of cosmology and messianic vision, I stand against the idea of
giving up government, instrumental rationality and distributive justice.
Nihilism is bullshit. People want a world for those they love. I think of
that other unforgettable novel, The Parable of the Sower, where white
suburban radicals called the Paints take some kind of pyrodrug and burn
neighborhoods just to party all night long. Breakdown is happening, you
don't have to hasten it. The question is really, which kind of
geoengineering do you want, which kind of state do you want, which kind of
transformation can we pull out of the breakdown.

Messianism and reformism coexist, it's like anarchism and communism - or
civil society and state. Two different things. Two coexisting beings. There
is no culture if you can't think opposites at once. Felix is exactly right
when he says that capitalism can't still be capitalism if it can't treat
nature as an externality. The Green New Deal is a state capitalist program,
and it's the most subversive thing in Western history. I support it on both
sides of the fence. Either trees have standing, or we all find out what
it's like to be felled. That's disaster - stars in your face.

seriously deliriously, Brian







> In the longer run, it's hard to imagine how capitalism can still be
>
> capitalism without treating "nature" as an externality. So the question
> then becomes, what are the condition under which a 'greener capitalism'
> can be pushed into something else. In a way that is like an update of
> the old Marxian idea that capitalism will produce productive forces on
> which communism can be realized.
>
>
> all the best. Felix
>
>

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