View all notes
Of course, the disenchanted early-modern perspectives which treated wilderness as barrenness were themselves relatively recent. As Andreas Malm points out, the European capitalist class was born in hatred of wildness. For Locke, wildness was not to be protected or revered, but to be subdued. Whatever was deemed wild, be it a forest or a population, was defined mainly by desolation, by what it lacked: subordination to the grid of production.
Where does the idea of "wilding" fit into this? As the -ing suffix implies, it is not a 'return to nature' but an artifice. It is a form of geoengineering. In a qualified endorsement of geoengineering, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues that the term must be rethought: "engineering implies we know what we’re doing more than we really do. Also, that we have more powers than we actually have." In this sense, wilding could be seen as a form of geoengineering on a small scale. It entails, not the retrusion and abdication of humanity, but our assumption of collective responsibility, within the necessary limits of our powers and knowledge. As Monbiot put it in his 'wilding' book, Feral, it isn't to restore ecosystems to any prior "natural" state but to engineer a set of circumstances where natural processes can take place.
This has no intrinsic political valence, however. It need not even be primarily motived by ecological considerations. It can be used to turn land, where farming has ceased to be profitable, into a commercial 'natural beauty' spot -- as with the Knepp Wildland in West Sussex. Moreover, as Monbiot acknowledges, "wilding" has a dark history. Even when not deployed as part of a brutally racist, blood and soil enterprise, most wildings have been the spontaneous result of "humanitarian disasters" -- massacres, plagues, starvation. From a certain perspective, the wilding of the planet would be coextensive with human extinction, as in the eerily beautiful, closing passages of Gore Vidal's novel, Kalki.
the arguments are intriguing but im mostly saving this for the understated beauty of the writing
This is a strangely paranoid discourse. It’s true that the centre has often found its nemesis in candidates, of the right and left, who succeeded in using online networks to outflank the traditional dominance of the centre in the print and broadcast media. But the ruling class, by definition, is the class that rules. And it is the richest ruling class in history, with the most complex and subtle instruments of domination. It has had more opportunity than any other group of people on the planet, ever, to shape politics, culture, and society. Could they really be upended by online mobs so easily?
[...]
In the background to this is a crisis in an older regime, an older way of practicing hegemony. The ruling class never rule by themselves; they never do anything by themselves. They are too divided to have a single interest. They require networks of institutions, think-tanks, lobbies, banks, media outlets and political parties to develop class-wide perspectives and strategies, and win public support. This is hegemonic in the sense that it seeks to build broad, cross-class consent for a social mission, a project for development, which in the last analysis is shaped by and for ruling class interests. It seeks to persuade people intellectually and morally, as well as chastising and disciplining them.
So what is it? Neoliberalism isn’t about ‘free markets’. That’s the populist soft sell, which claims that everyone is just a self-maximiser, out for maximum utility — whatever the fuck that is — yearning to be freed from moralist hypocrisies like ‘public service’. That was the classically liberal creed; just let everyone be as selfish as they really are, and it will all work out! What St Augustine called ‘cruel optimism’. But what posed as description was prescription. The mandarin sell, for policymakers, was different. People were too fucking stupid and socialistic to be self-maximisers. (I paraphrase). The power of the state and law had to be used to make them behave as such.
The issue was never the volume of regulations or spending, but their character. Financialisation, intrinsic to the neoliberal model, necessitated an explosion of regulations. The point was to reform economic and government activity so that everything operated like a market, construed as a kind of Darwinian mechanism for selecting efficiency through competition. That could mean things like Compulsory Competitive Tendering, internal markets, spending caps, workfare, the short-lived nudge unit etc.
It also entailed a counterrevolution against democracy. [...] in most states, it was sufficient to redistribute state power to unelected bodies, quangos, or centralise more of it in the executive, or outsource it to SERCO or similar bodies.
This diagrams a mode of power. One which transferred class power to corporations, linked to a new set of hegemonic practices governing people as ‘entrepreneurs’. For a while, combined with dynamite growth in south-east Asia, a boom in speculative capital, a series of Wall Street bubbles, the concomitant reduction in bargaining power and sharp decrease in share of incomes going to labour, increased profitability and thus investment.
But most people didn’t become neoliberal ideologues. Bits of the new dispensation were popularised and sedimented into more traditional ideologies — social democracy, socialism, authoritarian conservatism, classical liberalism, etc. There has never been a pure capitalist discourse. Ruling class parties had to operate on those traditional beliefs too, though they had trouble substantiating those commitments. Anyway, they were seen, especially on the social-liberal end of neoliberalism, as residual, being gradually supplanted by the new competitive individualism. That wasn’t entirely wrong; it just wasn’t the whole story.
god i love his writing
But these technologies are designed to fit existing social and cultural ideas. They represent themselves as a sort of magical solution to social problems, but their magical effect depends on the way they lubricate way-finding within an existing neoliberal framework. Whatever the problem, there’s an app for that, one weird trick to solve the erectile dysfunctions of neoliberalism.
Where communities break down, the network substitutes. Where news is no longer trustworthy, citizen journalism can bring the news to you direct and unfiltered (that’s pure ideology). Where politicians are no longer trustworthy, online communities can hold them to account (that, too, is ideology; the platforms facilitate online punishment beatings of individuals who breach mores). If you’re depressed, you can get cognitive behavioural therapy through an app on your phone. If you’re poor or underemployed, you can bid for jobs on taskrabbit, or use your car to make money through Uber or spend a few hours working for Deliveroo. If you’ve got a room you’re not using, post it on airbnb. If you think you’re not valued enough in your life, you can bid for a share in an increasingly diffuse online celebrity (again, pure ideology — celebrities are notoriously miserable). In other words, it administers users on the basis of the radical extension of market relations, and commodification.
This is not a hegemonic practice. It doesn’t seek to persuade anyone of the virtues of markets and neoliberal behaviour. It simply builds it into your practical experience. It's the persuasion of reality-shaping: what I might call a sub-hegemonic practice, since it works on the infrastructures rather than through the ideological and political superstructures. This is what neoliberal administrations have been doing for the last few decades, but far less efficiently. Tech treats us as behaviourist experimental subjects, to be hooked and then manipulated in real time for the advertisers. Now they’re under pressure by politicians to use this power for social good, which is terrifying. And in the new smart cities such as the one Google is building in Toronto they will try just that. But it’s neatly congruent with the post-democratic, beyond-hegemonic practice of neoliberal capitalism. It is the ideal model of what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘control society’. No one tells you what to do, what to believe in, what’s right or wrong: on the new technologies, whether it’s gaming or platforms, you are just given a series of stimuli, a set of options within an acceptable bandwidth, and get on with it.
!!!
Adult authority is so knowing, so sanctimonious, so frequently full of it about youth violence. But it isn't an adult experience, most of the time, to be regularly chased, smacked in the head, kicked in the stomach, baited, spat on, challenged to a fight, ambushed, have a weapon waved in one's face. Adults aren't the ones that have to deal with this.
Adolescence, for boys, especially working-class boys, is a violent threshold. When you're a teenager, you live in the state of hyperbole: where every misery is singling you out, where each sleight and disappointment is unbearable, where all emotion is consuming, and where humiliation is ultimate. And if there's violence, you think it will never stop. You think there will always be bullies, big sticks, and boys wielding them. Ambushes, sadists, knuckledusters, and gangs. Knives, sucker-punches, broken noses, and boys put in hospital.
This is what it's like, and you don't need a special theory -- say, of 'gangs' -- to comprehend it. And you don't have to seek the violence; it will find you. I can't tell you how many times I had to block blows, improvise escape, contrive to hide, or just run and run and run, hurdling barbed wire fences, tearing skin and flesh, charging through back yards, bombing across busy roads. As a boy, I ran so blindly from a boy that I dashed straight in front of the school bus. It had just enough time to brake so that all I got out of the interaction was a small groove in the back of my skull.
And how badly I wanted to come back at them, with anything, anything at all. It doesn't surprise me at all that young people -- and they're getting younger -- want to carry weapons. I wanted to carry weapons. Weapons seemed intrinsically impressive, the unanswerable answer. They were magic wands that would transform any difficult situation. They were the techne of rage, glamorously lethal. [...]
And adolescent boys who have good reason to fear attack, and that is an awful lot of them, have precious little protection. There's almost no one they can turn to. Adult authorities can present as dithering, indifferent, canting or downright callous: full of fire only after something disastrous happens, rather like the politicians who, as Gary Younge puts it, "respond to the coverage not the crime". They often think the same way as boys with knives do. The demand for more cops, more stop-and-search, tougher daddy figures, is a demand for bigger and better weapons: implicitly to protect the 'innocent' from the 'wicked'. It's what you get when working class lives only become visible at the point of catastrophe, as a pathology to be stamped out. It's fairy tale logic, magical thinking for adults, faced with their own helplessness.
the buildup to the last sentence is amazing
How does the spectre of communism still haunt quite well-to-do people after long spells of centrist administration? Perhaps it isn't irrelevant that Brazil is a society built on racial slavery, where the class system is still powerfully structured by race. Brazil was one of the biggest consumers of slaves, importing forty percent of the total in the Americas, and one of the last states to abolish slavery in 1888. It was subsequently one of the last to have a long, stable period of democratic government, which has now lasted for just over thirty years. The majority of workers identify as either black or multiracial. The vast majority of the middle class and bourgeoisie identify as white. These identifications don't have any 'phenotypical' validity, but they do link different classes in a symbolic chain back to the relations between African slaves and European slave-masters. History, as always, is sedimented into the unconscious.
ahhhh the last sentence is so gorgeous
As a predictable result, Greece's economy shrivelled, the debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketed, and the political system began to fly apart. Obviously, the austerity agenda was never about paying off the unpayable debt. Austerity is never about paying off the debt. There is no such thing as 'expansionary austerity'. Austerity predictably, in almost every case, suppressed growth for the duration, making it impossible to pay off any debt. Debt is the political instrument through which austerity, desired for other reasons, is achieved. In this case, austerity was the means by which the social advances achieved by past Greek generations - particularly the leftist movements that arose after the dictatorship - would be undone. And while much has been achieved in that respect, the debt-to-GDP ratio in Greece has barely moved since 2013. Last year it reached a new record high at 181%, well over the 60% limit that usually triggers the "excessive deficit regime". This after a series of 'bailout' packages came totalling €241.6 billion euros. Even so, Greece's status has been 'normalised'. To reiterate, it was never about the debt. Austerity is never about the debt.
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] If we could separate meaning from sound, he adds, 'we'd read plot summaries rather than novels.' Or, in the domain of politics, listicles rather than the Communist Manifesto. But the fact that the common sense is what it is, indicates how much of the history of writing has been repressed: the idea of peering through a series of coloured knots onto reality would seem to be a profound misunderstanding of what the knots were for. Knots might illuminate, but they can't get out of the way of their own meaning. Yet we think we can use language as though it could be, and should aspire to be, as transparent as a windowpane. We expect language to get out of the way. We demand clarity.
The demand for clarity in its modern sense is ideologically suspect, rooted in an idealistic metaphysic of meaning, but it is seductive because it appears to be inclusive and democratic in its approach to communication. Its apparent obverse, say, 'obscurity', is regarded as an elitist practice, akin to obfuscation. [...]
[...] poetry, as Terry Eagleton argues, 'is something which is done to us, not just said to us. The meaning of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.' The separation of truth from the materiality of language is a product of modernity, linguistic specialisation, and a specifically capitalist division of labour. But as a result of this division, a prejudice has emerged which regards any accentuation of the aesthetic, sensuous properties of language, outside the relatively harmless sphere of entertainment, as a frivolous obstacle to understanding. At best an indulgence, at worst manipulative. In its left-moralist iteration, this prejudice can take the form of the claim that 'fancy' prose is 'elitist', 'exclusive', evading comprehension by 'real people'.
[...] These days, such covert snobbery often comes from graduate students, guiltily devouring Baudrillard on the down-low while earnestly masticating gruel-thin versions of Marxism for the gratuitously patronised and underestimated readers of the revolutionary press: the negative ideographs of the TheoryBro.
There is, deposited in this ideology of 'clarity', a crude theory of pedagogy. According to this view, difficulty and obstacles to the most 'straightforward' comprehension are inevitably blocks which any normal human will simply find discouraging - rather than, perhaps, tantalising invitations to learn and grow. As thought the ideal learner has no desire to be challenged, beyond the reading of an alphabetti-spaghetti version of any given issue. In many ways, obstacles are what pedagogy thrives on: the fact that something suggests a mystery but doesn't immediately yield to understand is what creates a desire to know more.
hahaha i love his writing. there's obviously gotta be some balance (some people will be stymied by intellectual roadblocks earlier than others), but this perspective here is refreshing & important