Re: <nettime> How do we govern ourselves? (was: Mechanical Turkish)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 02/17/2018 07:44 AM, Blake Stimson wrote:

> I do not put much stock in the Bourdieuian category of “cultural 
> capital” and instead do indeed believe that power lies solely in the 
> possession of money or the capacity for violence. Politics, as I use the 
> term, is simply the state.
....
>  Put more simply, the state is a 
> battle between the capacity for public or disinterested regulation which 
> creates freedom and its corruption by private interests.

Now here we fudamentally disagree. Since at least sometime around the 
Wars of Religion, European societies, and subsequently their emancipated 
colonies, have taken on board the fundamental, resistant difference of 
individual and community belief - defined precisely by its distance from 
(yet not necessarily by its antagonism to) the state. The whole dynamic 
of these societies, up to and beyond the end of absolutism and the 
emergence of the bourgeois democracies, has been shaped by that 
difference, in its ever more complex combinations with the bureaucratic 
state and capitalist production. And there are very practical reasons 
for this. To see like a state is good: it means you can take on the 
responsibility of participating in the governing process. To identify 
with the state, when you are not part of its apparatus, is devastatingly 
bad: it means you abandon both the capacity for critique that defines 
being a citizen, and the reserve of intimate conviction that defines 
being an individual.

Such a society fully identified with the state does conform to the ideal 
currently promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, which many theorists, 
including occasionally myself, are tempted to admire for the degree of 
agency it can wield. However the absence of critique has resulted in an 
embrace of US-style imperialial oligopolistic state-capitalist 
industrial production on a scale that appears destined to foreclose the 
existence of human civilization and untold millions of other species on 
the earth through the release of greenhouse gases. A state that is not 
subject to critique becomes hypertrophic, as the US did when it 
instituted zones of publically sanctioned secrecy around nuclear weapons 
production during WWII. This was not only done because of nasty market 
actors confronting a good social-democratic Rooseveltian state. Rather, 
it was done at the dark heart of that state-form. The struggle against 
the military imperial state is as much of the essence, and remains just 
as timely, as the struggle for a social-democratic state able to 
overcome inequalities and address the ecological consequences of 
reckless industrialization.

That said, I continue to agree with you that the single emphasis on 
resistance is a dead end. I just don't think you can theorize any sort 
of future development without taking on board the elements listed above.

> I take us to agree when you say “What interests ... are the 
> social mediations that cause a really existing state to see in 
> particular ways”—-but only insofar as we agree that we ourselves are 
> part and parcel of those social mediations.

Indeed, the caveat was intended as part of the argument. To be an active 
part of those mediations is to act politically, whether as an artist or 
a knowledge producer or an organizer or a career functionary (Hegelian 
please!) or a judge. All of which, by the way, are at one remove from 
money and the capacity to exercise violence.

> This is true even if that 
> mediating is limited to the position of refusal my students identify 
> when they say “I’m trash.” This, after all, is just a popular version of 
> arty academic trends such as the so-called new materialisms of Latour et 
> al and we could point to myriad historical examples of the same sort of 
> refusal throughout the romantic tradition from Schiller to Foucault and 
> beyond.

Someday soon I am going to read "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. 
Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene." This came out of a group 
working on "multispecies dumps" - literally, life in the trash. When I 
contemplate the general framing of that project, I cannot help thinking, 
like yourself, Blake, that here are entitled citizens giving up the 
politics game rather too soon. Climate change tends to make people think 
that if it's already the end of the world, we may as well imagine a 
different one. Myself, I imagine in great detail the barbarous descent 
into ethnostate authoritarianism that the denial of and reaction to 
climate change is already bringing, and it gives me totally different 
ideas! The very ones we are discussing here. Some other day I will 
analyze what I find in that book, the pros as well as the cons; however 
I am going to spare you that whole discussion right now. You have been 
very gracious for accepting to go down into the weeds of political 
theory, this was the best exchange because we actually got to what we 
are talking about, thanks for that.
> In our waning liberal modernity, good art, like good politics, is that 
> realism which enhances our capacity to think our own individual being 
> institutionally or, in other words, to see like a 
> (democratic-cum-socialist) state.
I'm with Felix on this one: your last clause cuts out way too many 
institutions. The social-democratic-cum-socialist state, which does not 
presently exist, is only a figure of speech or intellectual shorthand 
for imagining the combinations of state, capital and critical civil 
society that would be required to overcome the present crisis. In the 
US, that more complex state of society was envisaged in the Sixties by 
many people (it's fascinating to read certain strands of SDS on this, 
but they're far from the only ones). Then, indeed, the gestures of the 
more romantic and less complex actors (the Weathermen, etc) were seized 
upon to fuel the development of the new conservatism that has burgeoned 
ever since then. Our discussion has an air of the antique about it, 
because it was already the discussion of that time: How to govern 
ourselves? How to achieve a democratic socialism in the face of 
globalizing capitalism?

Blake, I reckon we've had our words on this subject, for the time being. 
You're eminently free to respond, but for my part I would invite anyone 
else who finds it important, to take up that last question in fully 
contemporary terms.

all the best, and really, my gratitude for bothering to go a little deeper,

Brian


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