November 19, 2010

Podcast on Against the Grain

A podcast on Against the Grain--a discussion about democracy and technology:

Has the internet ushered in a new era of mass participation and greater democracy? Or has the communications and networking revolution encouraged millions on the Left to be politically passive, while neoliberal capitalism strengthens its position? In her book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodi Dean reconsiders the democratic potential of communications media.

http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/367/id/451448/wed-11-10-10-democracy-technology.
Nov 19, 2010 1:59:24 PM

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Search and store In One Dimension Woman, Nina Power offers the notion of taxonimal drive. She introduces the idea in the context of contemporary pornography: on the internet, one can find whatever one wants, although almost as soon as one finds it, one doesn't really want it anymore. Rather, one wants to see what else is out there. The item itself no longer scintillates. The drive to find other images, to keep moving and looking and marking, takes it place. After you've seen five or six busty amputee tops, you've seen them all--or have you? maybe there are different types? let's look for them! Desire switches into drive, now a drive to taxonimize and classify (blond, with shoes; shaved, no gun; etc...). Nina links taxonomical drive with contemporary porn's endeavor to bore us all to death and turn sex into work. That is to say, her point is part of a larger argument about contemporary capitalism and its absorption of its outside. I agree. I also think it could be useful to think further with the notion of taxonomical drive. Who is the taxonomy for? The easy answer is that it is for the individual porn consumer: I download, classify, and tag photos and videos so that I can find them when I need them. The taxonomy is for me, in the future. I never know what I might desire, so I can plan for desire in the future. Clearly I don't desire now--if so, I wouldn't be archiving all this stuff, I...
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Inept or unwilling? I've been wondering about the problem of the left. Is it inept or unwilling? I think the latter (although I can be persuaded by those who wish to argue, "why choose?"). Much left discussion laments how the left doesn't have any idea, can't get its act together, etc--as if the problem were a sort of inability to do things, a kind of bumbling fumbling. But this is mistaken. The actual problem is unwilling--not willing at all. Once the New Left delegitimized the old one, it made political will into an offense, a crime with all sorts of different elements: --taking the place or speaking for another (the crime of representation); --obscuring other crimes and harms (the crime of exclusion); --judging, condemning, and failing to acknowledge the large terrain of complicating factors necessarily disrupting simple notions of agency (the crime of dogmatism); --employing dangerous totalizing fantasies that posit an end of history and lead to genocidal adventurism (the crime of utopianism or, as Mark Fisher so persuasively demonstrates, of adopting a fundamentally irrational and unrealistic stance, of failing to concede to the reality of capitalism). Arch criminal number one: communism (and so the above-mentioned charges participate in the long honored fascist program of first eliminating the communists and then picking off the rest of the unnecessary and inassimilable one by one). But a politics without representation, exclusion, dogmatism, and utopianism is no politics at all (which is why Schmitt quite rightly sees liberalism as lacking a politics). It is instead an...

Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is a political theorist.

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