Post-Social-Democracy

It is after the WWII that the Idea of Social-Democracy becomes so apparent. It will be an ideological pursuit for the years to come until 1960's where the Welfare State will face its first Crisis. Charlie Chaplin's speech from his movie "The Great Dictator" will inaugurate the desire of social democracy which became a successful program of a period that followed. The rise and popularity of Social-Democracy will be enhanced by two factors that consequently will play a crucial role in its decline. Social-Democracy "was sustained by two realities of the times: the incredible expansion of the world-economy, which created the resources that made the redistribution possible; and United States hegemony in the world-system, which ensured the relative stability of the world-system, and especially the absence of serious violence within this wealthy zone." (Wallerstein, 2011) 


The period of forever progression didn't last and right after 60's the world economy falls into a stagnation the late phase of which we live today. Additional to that America's hegemonic role will start, slowly, to decline. The 70's will mark the new era according to Immanuel Wallerstein. "The new era beginning in the 1970s saw the end of the world centrist consensus on the virtues of the welfare state and state-managed “development.” It was replaced by a new, more rightwing ideology, called variously neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus, which preached the merits of reliance on markets rather than on governments. This program was said to be based on a supposedly new reality of “globalization” to which “there was no alternative.” " (Wallerstein, 2011) It seems therefore that the pressing question of our time is if there is an alternative. If Social-Democracy is an illusion in 2011 then where the world system is moving towards? 


 Source: Immanuel Wallerstein: The Social-Democratic Illusion

On Think Tanks

"Think Tanks, whether on the left or right are peddling Hayek's ideology in some form another - a managed and technocratic version of the free market as the central dynamic of society."
Adam Curtis

Suely Rolnik, Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible / Journal / e-flux

"... it was clear by then that, in order to respond to industrial capitalism (with its disciplinary society and its identitarian logic), it was necessary to oppose a fluid, flexible, and hybrid logic that had been appropriated from the 1960s and 70s. It has now become a mistake to take the latter as a value in itself—since it came to constitute the dominant logic of neoliberalism and its society of control. It is, therefore, within this logic—between different politics of flexibility, fluidity, and hybridization—that the struggles take place around tracing the cartographies of our globalized contemporaneity....

asking the question of whether to refuse or celebrate the cartographies marked by cultural hybridization, flexibility, and fluidity would result in putting forward a false problem. It is just as false to pose the question of the pertinence of art’s role in the invention of such cartographies. The forces at work in each artistic proposal are what matter. What matters are the ways in which creation starts from the turbulences of contemporary sensible experience and the extent to which artistic practice is the consequence of frictions, tensions, and impossibilities that are implicated by the complex and singular construction of a globalized society at each moment and in each context. In the field of visual arts, those forces are embodied not only in the works themselves, but in their exhibitions and the curatorial concepts they articulate, in the critical texts that accompany them, and the directives of the museums that host them—and also, of course, in all of the artistic practices that take place in a drift beyond the institutional territory of art."

Suely Rolnik, Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible / Journal / e-flux

Panic in the streets of London

"The prime minister's tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital -- in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was "reasonable," it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There's no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals.
Instead, one talks of "ideology". But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the "economic-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power-- that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic -- haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression." G&D  


People tend to underestimate London riots due to lack of any ideological support. But is this what is really lacking? On the contrary someone could argue that the lack of any ideological preoccupation reveals the pure desire machines of the public that are so trapped in the capitalist realm.  Ideology tends to mask, hide or repress desires which while expressed freely reveal the magnitude of functioning of those machines.   

Introduce a bit of anarchy, become an agent of chaos

I've watched the other day again Christopher Nolan's Batman "The Dark Knight". An impressive work by Christopher, no doubt, but it was another Nolan that emerges as the genius of the film. Jonathan is Christopher's young brother and he is an author and screenwriter. You find him writing Memento back in 2000 and Prestige six years later before he launches the absolute anarchy encapsulated in Joker's persona.

Jonathan seems familiar with chaos theory, complexity science and the idea of emergence. He goes that far by replicating the well known Prisoner's dilema when the boats' fates, resting in a fragile equilibrium that could be destabilised any moment, have been left to a single human decision (the well known Cold war technique that pushed finally human out of the loop). Mostly though, Jonathan is aware of accidents and non-linearities, the dynamic aspect of the world and as a consequence  the unpredictability immanent in every aspect of life.

"Do you know that thing about chaos" asks Joker to "the two faced" Dent. "It's there." Something that Nolan tries to make apparent through out the film. Chaos is an implicit aspect of order.  

Taking plans as our ultimate reality turns out to be a 'bad' Joke. The obsession with order is a petty as petty is the obsession with chaos. But now and then, we can turn ourselves into dogs chasing cars. Introducing a bit of anarchy, upsetting the established order we drive the course of the system in a new direction. Not necessarily good or bad but new.

"You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. I just DO things. I’m just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans: schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer; I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are."   Zizek's take on Batman here 

biopoliticis and noopolitics

While Foucault was suggesting through his biopolitics the process of extracting information form the human body, of understanding and exploiting its mechanisms, the idea of noopolitics suggests the process of extracting information from the human brain, of understanding and exploiting its own mechanisms. Twenty years of constant networking and protocol control transformed a mass of skilled human brains into a network-like entities that melded together into armies of data consumption/production. Noopolitics   

Ray Brassier: Noise and Capitalism

Four parts of Ray Brassier's interview to Braham Leven. 


1/ "we can attain an objective perspective on our own subjectivity"


2/ "Integrated global capitalism is constitutively dysfunctional: it works by breaking down. It is fueled by random undecidabilities, excessive inconsistencies, aleatory interruptions, which it continuously reappropriates, axiomatizing empirical contingency. It turns catastrophe into a resource, ruin into an opportunity, harnessing the uncomputible."


3/ "The interesting [part] about noise is its dis-organizing potency: the incompressibility of a signal interfering with the redundancy in the structure of the receiver. Not transduction but schizduction: noise scrambles the capacity for self-organization."


4/ "there can be no ‘aesthetics of noise’, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation."