Re: <nettime> Return of the F-scale

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 28 Feb 2016, at 23:29, Brian Holmes wrote:

> Those are my thoughts,
Really great.

What follows is more chiming in than replying to you per se, Brian. 
Though I do want to amplify one thing you said:
> You know, by simple math of wealth and access, I'm of the privileged.
> But I'm frankly afraid of the liberal future which is becoming equal
> to the authoritarian one. Intellectuals should help imagine, plan,
> test and build a different present, on all levels from technics to
> ethics to affects and back again. It takes some theory and a whole lot
> more.
-- in particular a much wider range of experiences and views. If 
sunlight is the best disinfectant, diversity (multiplicity, 
polyvocality, call it what you like) is the best fertilizer. I'm happy 
this discussion is happening on nettime, and I'd be even happier if we 
had a wider range of people chiming in. I'm pretty sure a few people 
around here have some experience with authoritarianism in everyday life. 
That said...
'The left' (or whatever you want to call it) hasn't responded to this 
authoritarian turn very effectively, or even just to its 
retro-turbo-fascist symptoms. That's not surprising, really. The key 
institution the left relies on at almost every point -- the university 
-- has proven itself more adept at capturing and taming its various 
constituencies with endless administrativia, compliance, job security 
anxieties, and debt. If those dysfunctions were the price we paid for 
some really compelling product, we could overlook them. But the norms of 
the 'academic' dissemination of ideas guarantee that it'll continue on 
its trajectory of becoming increasingly irrelevant: the credentialism 
more exclusive, the publications more impenetrable, the facilities less 
accessible -- the very opposite of compelling.
But if we look at that same cluster of problems at a smaller scale, as 
Patrice suggests, we'll see good things for the most part: deeply 
social, personal engagements that shape individuals intellectually and 
emotionally, the shifting tides of communities of inquiry, and 
undeniable advances in the complexity, richness, and intimacy of thought 
and practice -- the kinds of things leftists tend to value. But when we 
try to survey this field more systemically, what we see looks more like 
a catastrophic wasteland: an endless expanse of sentimentality, 
idiosyncratic positions and relations, writings that no one will ever 
read, projects abandoned then forgotten, events recorded on the wind, 
and above all frustrated aspirations.
It's easy to look at that and say, "Well, the left needs to improve its 
ability to operate at a large scale"-- and that's true to a limited 
extent. But the left needs to recognize that there's a reason it sucks 
at large scales: functioning and acting at a large scale is antithetical 
to most things the left values. But why is that? Why would different 
political tendencies be asymmetrical in their ability to operate at 
different scales? Well, a better question is why would anyone think that 
disparate tendencies would or should have symmetrical or equivalent 
abilities? Why would political tendencies that embrace persuasion and 
consensus be as effective at any 'scale' -- and there are many kinds of 
scales -- as tendencies that embrace violence and coercion? And why 
would political tendencies that reject the accumulation of wealth be as 
effective in any context as tendencies that fetishize it? They won't be. 
'Scale' presupposes wealth, and wealth presupposes coercion. That's why 
leftist proposals about scaling often sound ridiculous -- sure, as soon 
as we're done with 'our own big data projects' we can start on 'our own 
antiballistic missile systems' and 'our own pharmaceuticals.'
But why talk about left and right when this thread began with Brian's 
forward about *authoritarianism*? Well, for starters our vocabulary for 
discussing authoritarianism barely exists -- which is why Geert had to 
jump directly to Reich, de Mause, and Theweleit, even at the risk of 
disturbing the ghosts of therapy for the masses. It's not surprising 
that we'd find ourselves in this situation. Seriously, how much 
'establishment' support should we expect for a kind of analysis that 
waved away the fundamental distinction of the Cold War, capitalism vs 
communism, to focus on what they have in common? And the same goes, in 
different ways, for sources of support from the 'alternatives': radicals 
of every stripe, from the ludicrous to the pragmatic, have had their own 
reasons for discouraging analyses that would emphasize what their 
movements had in common with the establishment(s). So we need to talk 
about left and right -- not because they're valuable categories in 
themselves, but because they've served as proxies (masks, really) for 
efforts to grapple with authoritarianism.
But we also need to look for analyses that are independent of the 
(counter)therapeutic tradition Geert mentioned. In my view, one useful 
tool comes from Bakhtin, the Russian (or Soviet, if you like) literary 
historian and theorist -- specifically, his idea of dialogic vs 
monologic. I'll do a bit of violence to his work by adding some pop 
Nietzscheo-Kierkegaardian rubbish, but for those who haven't spent 
any/much time with it, Bakhtin laid out these two terms as a way to 
understand a fundamental conflict in literature -- with political 
implications that seem plainly clear for speech.
The dialogic is an environmental form of language that emphasizes a 
multiplicity of voices and tends toward the comic: a sort of 'acoustic' 
space in which individual invention is almost impossible to identify 
amidst the noise of babble, echo, and laughter in its deepest forms, 
irony and parody (as opposed to mockery, which is laughter in the 
service of aggression). In this kind of linguistic environment, meanings 
are multiple and mutable, so they tend to dissolve boundaries of almost 
every kind, including the boundaries of the self. When you apply this 
kind of logic to social and political entities -- say, by asking where 
would we find it or what would it look like? -- I don't think it's 
surprising we'd find it aligned with the multiplication of new kinds of 
selves, the generative uses of social divisions, the celebration of 
hybridity and gradation -- for example, in form like multi-ethnicity, or 
the transformation of 'sexual' distinction into less determinate, more 
creative preferential tendencies.
In contrast to this, there's the monologic, which insists on a tragic 
singularity and identity of thought, voice, and meaning. The result is a 
violent positivism in which idea = utterance = object. It aims to be the 
first and last word, with no echo that might hint at the erosion of 
meaning. It leaves as little room as possible -- preferably none at all 
-- for ambiguity, uncertainty, doubt, skepticism, or even 
circumspection. It's easy to see, I think, how this tendency would 
appeal not just to military institutions but also to particular kinds of 
religion (evangelical on the one hand and reactionary on the other), for 
example. And why it would lend itself to nostalgist tendencies (dead men 
don't talk back) while aligning itself against the emergence and 
legitimation of new kinds of subjectivity (who *do* talk back). And how 
*it would draw many disparate traditions together* into effective, 
executive, and instrumental political formations.
In my view, there's no better tool for understanding the fundamental 
asymmetry of left and right -- and, in this context, how those woolly 
terms would come to serve as proxies for varying degrees of 
authoritarianism. And I don't just mean on the primary level of a 
mapping in which left = dialogic and right = monologic (which is too 
blunt but pretty effective). I also mean a way of explaining why leftist 
efforts to mimic rightist activities and institutions are often doomed 
-- to betray their principles, to sell out, to become hollow-sounding, 
to be appropriated by institutions in ways that are both completely 
cynical *and* completely naive.
Cheers,
T

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