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When reality fails the model, the electorate refusing to do what they are told, the result is an epistemological crisis which throws up various and variously wild speculations. The Russians are said to have ‘hacked’ the election, and there is a useful elision in the verb between meaning literal IT interventions (such as the leak of John Podesta’s emails that so outraged Clinton’s supporters because it disclosed certain truths about their candidate, plausibly-enough blamed on hackers with Russian backing), and in a more vague and very urgent sense of tweaking any system towards a desired outcome in some way or other. On the latter, leaving aside the obvious hypocrisy of the outrage (given the US’s long and vigorous history of interference in foreign elections, from Italy in 1948 through the 1970s, Japan in 1951, Germany 1953, via the Philipines, Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Chile in 1964, and on and on – eighty-one times between 1946 and 2000, not counting coups, according to an estimate by political scientist Dov Levin), the paranoid nebulousness of the latter, broader allegation is striking.
Discussing CA’s signature technique of ‘psychographics’, one contributor warned urgently that the company was ‘using psychological techniques to change people’s thoughts and behaviour’. Of course, this could be read as a thoroughly banal description of everyday PR – or as crude apocalyptic warning of nefarious, Manchurian Candidate– or They Live-style total manipulation.
Certainly, there is no ‘free’ choice under capitalism, no preference not complexly shaped. The intricacies of agency, of choice and its constraints under neoliberalism and its ideologies demand nuanced analysis. That, visions of mind-control rays, of putting the ’fluence on the masses, ‘chang[ing] people’s thoughs’, are not.
’For some opponents of Brexit, the idea that the EU referendum was hijacked by alt-right hypnotists wielding high-tech psychological weaponry looks, perhaps, like a reasonable explanation,’ the report startlingly concludes, stretching the definition of ‘reasonable’ by some way. Almost ruefully the piece closes: ’But the known facts don’t, quite, support this theory.’
on Cambridge Analytica. nice rejoinder to liberal hysteria over that
If the failure of presidentialness is less the failure of the inaugurated persuader-in-chief to persuade than of the unpersuaded to be persuadable, presidentialness’s partisans can only pine to dissolve the people and elect another.
love this
[...] The term itself conveys loss but no responsibility for that loss.
Indeed, if salvage conjures Robinson Crusoe salvaging from the wreckage enough to survive, those socialists who came of age ‘in the wilderness’, watching the wreckage of the Old Left wash up on the beach, may see, if not a parallel, perhaps an analogy with our own ways of speaking about politics – and thus of shaping it.
poetic
Dare we speak, then, of salvage or even of hope? If we would struggle to keep alive – or resurrect – movements and traditions, revolutionary ways of parsing the world, the wisdom of our forebears and ancestors, in what language should we speak of such slippery things? And if our dialects and our minds, our very perceptions, have been colonised and standardised, making our own speech foreign to us? Twenty-first-century Marxists must be nimble if we are to revive our own idiolect: if its grammatical structure remains one shaped by class, its vocabulary must have enough breadth to encompass multiple and intersecting identities and realities, its nouns and pronouns unrestricted by binary gender. Can we lubricate our tongues with our own voices, our working- class dialects and interethnic inventions and personal pidgins, and create a living, intercultural lexicon to deploy against the forces of imperialism and the capitalist death drive? If Marxism is, as Walter Benjamin would have it, a conversation between the living and the dead, what does it mean when the dead outnumber the living? Can our old languages and our new ones speak us forward?
cool
The Left enthusiasts of Nick Land appear to come from tonier climes. They are often clustered within academia, the tech sector, venture capitalism, or the media. Sometimes calling themselves ‘Left Accelerationists’, they produce political tracts such as the ‘#AltWoke Manifesto’. Keen to harness the disruptive power of technology and global capital, they nonetheless try to superficially distance themselves from Land’s reactionary conclusions. They want to be futurists without being fascists.
Such enthusiasts are dazzled by the shiny new future that Land promises, ignoring the fundamentally ‘Randian’ conception of productivity implied by Futurist thought. Land’s anti-materialism severs productivity from the socially-necessary human labour which actually brings it about. Instead, production is equated with a frictionless ‘creativity’, conjuring up images of the Silicon Valley guru who independently create their miracles ex nihilo. That is why Land’s neo-confederate ideology is not as sanitised as presented to left audiences. For ‘white exit’ (comparable to Ayn Rand’s ‘capital strike’) purposefully ignores the actual human labour which will be required to keep these libertarian ‘utopias’ running. It will be a labour force with ‘no voice’, hardly distinguishable from slavery itself.
To be sure, Leftists may appreciate Dugin and Land for seemingly different reasons; cultural ‘authenticity’ in the former, and techno-futurism in the latter. What they fail to notice, however, is the deep commonality between Dugin and Land’s underlying positions. It is a commonality which precludes the application of their thought to any emancipatory program.
ha. wonder how the deepmind guy feels about this description
Burn! depicts two parallel trajectories: on the one hand, the moral abyss into which neocolonialism pushes its agents and, on the other, the progressive development of a political consciousness among the ruled people. When Walker meets Dolores, he believes in civilisation and progress, with the illusion that anticolonialism and British trade merge into a common cause. Ten years later - a period condensing the contradictions of a century [...] - he has lost his illusions and his Western culture is reduced to pure instrumental reason: he likes to do his work well and is interested exclusively in 'how', not in 'why', to do it. Dolores, on the contrary, knows he fights for liberation even if he still does not know 'how' to realise his goal. [...]
[...] Like Dionysus in Greek mythology, Lenin could reborn. This is not an announcement of victory; it is a socialist wager, based on the recognition that all has to be rebuilt.
damn. good section ending (if we ignore the missing "be" before "reborn"). worth thinking about more - the cyclical nature of things? destroying, rebuilding?
[...] she had retreated into a prison of fear and suffering whereas her sons had chosen the struggle: 'they looked for life, and their reasons were stronger than mine.' They did not look for sacrifice or martyrdom and their political choice was rooted in a vital desire of freedom. 'What survives is desire; they cannot kill this desire. [...]' [...]
on Carmen Castillo's 2007 film, Santa Fe Street, about the death of her husband (an MIR revolutionary) in Chile
[...] Paul Celan distinguished between u-topia and utopia. U-topia, literally 'no-place,' is a nonexisting locus, whereas utopia meas a hope, an expectation, a vision of the future, something not existing yet. According to Ernst Bloch, utopia is a prefiguration, the realm of the 'not yet' (noch nicht). This is also the meaning of Celan's utopia, 'something open and free' to which poetry could give a form. Today, after the collapse of twentieth-century revolutions, utopia does not appear as a 'not yet', but rather as u-topia, a no-longer-existing place, a destroyed utopia that is the object of melancholy art. Realms of memory are places (topoi) created in order to remember hopes turned into no-places, something that no longer exists. The utopias of the twenty-first century still have to be invented.