Re: <nettime> Forget who owns the truth. Just talk about the weather.

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Christian,

Thanks for taking the time to dialogue. It's rare, and I appreciate it.

First, yes, I think that the clearly separate spheres of communication you
describe would offer a much more robust range of truth claims and
opportunities for belief, within which individuals could circulate and
gradually fulfill their process of self-formation. That's definitely the
Enlightenment ideal, and I think even in the Americas, Humboldt was the key
influence in structuring the university as a kind of idealized polis
featuring that kind of separation/circulation. More broadly - and beyond
the university - that was the post-WWII social-democratic ideal,
institutionalized within the framework of Keynesian economics.

No doubt all the above is significantly more available in Austria today
than elsewhere - I don't know the Austrian situation in detail. In my case
I write from a place of desperation, the USA, where the ideally separate
spheres are all mercilessly blended together 24/7. The blender is
capitalism, but I think it must be conceived as national capitalism, which
brings in all the historical factors of colonialism, racism, religious
affiliation and class structure, as well as the competition between nations
that typically acts to forge those components into a national culture.
Today in the US, national capitalism has become a toxic mess fought over by
rival factions - I don't need to go into the details.

What's preoccupying to me is the inability to take basic decisions in the
face of an emergency situation, namely climate change. There is a lot more
talk about the weather than just a few years ago, but since it can't be
translated into policy and institutional change it becomes listless,
unfocused, dominated by fear and depression, all of which opens the door to
escapism - for which the market abundantly provides. Even the university
suffers from this paralysis, mostly because it's under attack by fascists,
but also because it is increasingly traversed by the profit motive. I don't
think European countries are entirely free of these problems.

This is the context in which I call for attempts at "growing inwards"
through the deliberate fostering of conversation and action by small
groups. This would be analogous to a process of Bildung under adverse
conditions. I think you could find even closer analogy in Reinhart
Koselleck's famous book, Critique and Crisis, where he shows how the
private sphere of religious belief, carved out during the Wars of Religion
in Europe, formed the protected arena in which ideals of public freedom,
equality and rule by law could be developed. 'In secret free' was,
according to Koselleck, the religious watchword under which ideas of the
secular public sphere gradually emerged.

Now for sure, what I am interested in today are encounters between critical
scientific knowledge and processes of value formation (or life
orientation). This is what Bruno Latour was getting at when he brought the
cosmological questions of fellow anthropologists into the technical
discussion of climate science and its relation to politics. Cosmology
becomes relevant, not only because individual mobility between
rule-governed public spheres is breaking down, but also because the
societies supposedly governed by that 'music of the spheres' have
nonetheless brought us to the present pass. Indeed there is some doubt
whether the earth system can stand more individual mobility in the form of
automobile and air transportation. The satisfaction of infinite individual
desire through collectively produced technological means may not be an
essential feature of Enlightenment social theory, but in practice they have
been melded together. And as Adorno used to say, "The whole is the untrue."

To close I'd like to ask if you or anyone else has opinions about a mostly
Viennese group of social scientists including
Christoph Görg, Ulrich Brand, Helmut Haberl, and others such as Markus
Wissen or Daniel Hausknost. The first three are co-authors, with some
others, of a paper called 'Challenges for Social - Ecological
Transformations: Contributions from Social and Political Ecology.' They
maintain that environmental conditions require fundamental structural
changes in social organization, beyond the paradigm of energy transition
and electromobility that is currently being proposed by governments and
corporations. I'm not sure they have a clear idea of what those structural
changes are, but they do suggest identifying and analyzing the multiple
power-formations which are actively blocking any such transformation, and
thereby producing the state of desperate paralysis to which I referred
above.

On the one hand, I totally agree and think that's a crucial discussion for
everyone- it's one of the things that could be cracked open through a
certain withdrawal from politically polarized conditions in which the
search for any kind of truth is immediately foreclosed by conflict. In
addition to that kind of technical and disciplinary discussion, I think
that a cultural turn toward intensive 'growing inward' could raise more
intimate issues about individual life orientation, beyond electromobility
and infinite desire. Thereby science and belief might become, not
antagonists as they are today in the benighted country where I live, but
instead, differentiated parts of a newly unified and sharable truth.

Warmly, Brian


On Sat, Sep 9, 2023, 10:58 Christian Swertz via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Dear Brian,
>
> Am 07.09.23 um 15:05 schrieb Brian Holmes via nettime-l:
> > I don't think the old question about the economic ownership of the truth
> is
> > the right one.
>
> I fully agree. Probably because I'm a scientist. From a scientific point
> of view, truth can not be owned since truth does not require the
> existence of ownership, while ownership requires the existence of truth
> (like in the theory of law by Kelsen). Since the Austrian constitution
> is based on the theory of Kelsen and includes the freedom of research
> and teaching sciences, the universities in Austria (and probably in some
> other nations as well) are places where "they" don't rule (if "they" are
> market radical capitalists, religious fanatics, data religion fanatics
> or any other ideology). Of course there are attempts to rule
> universities. Many colleagues just observe this with some interest, do
> critical papers occaionally, and do not really care for these attempts
> (some do other things - but that's their decision).
>
> This might be one of the rare places in institutions where critical
> knowledge can be produced (including some theories about "critic"). As
> far as I see, the basic assumptions behind these places like the
> autonomy of the subject also allow to answer the question how ordinary
> people - or just: people - can "own" the truth: Do it yourself. If you
> create truth yourself, it's yours. And everybody can do that (and decide
> against it). Imagine a world were everybody enjoys the privileges of a
> full (tenured) professor: safe job, well paid, free to create truth,
> little obligations. Would be great IMHO - but it's not really a new
> idea. As far as I see, authors like Marx and Keynes made similar
> suggestions. And of course there are much older traces too (Graeber
> created an impressive collection of examples). But still a nice idea.
>
> As "truth" and "ownership", "truth" and "live up to what you believe"
> are obviously two different things. For believe, you have to make
> compromises as soon as you join any community. Fortunately, it's no
> problem to be convinced of one believe (and truth) and still do
> something else. For truth, it's certainly a good idea to consider the
> difference between public and private use of reason made by Kant: you
> can think capitalism is stupid, say that in public - and still work as
> an employee.
>
> But I assume that you focused on the public sphere with this one:
>
> > Shared belief in a secular truth has become almost impossible.
>
> Obviously, "shared belief" can not mean that everybody beliefs the same,
> but that the beliefe that everybody can choose what to beliefe is
> accepted by everybody (this dialectic is not a beliefe, but based on
> logic, so in the sphere of "truth"). I recently made a suggestion to
> shape a public sphere to contribute to this problem from an educational
> point of view (I do research in media education). The basic assumption
> is that people can move between languages, ideas of truth and so on.
> Moving between languages, ideas of truth and so on is what is called
> bildung in German (development of the person is probably a good
> translation). So - you develop yourself as a person including your idea
> of truth and your believes while moving between truths. Humboldt created
> this idea. An that's why schools offer arts, sciences, humanities, sport
> and so on - these are all different "truth" spheres. The students move
> between them while attending different lesson and develop themself as
> persons in this movement.
>
> I recently suggested to transfer this idea to the public sphere
> (https://doi.org/10.21243/mi-01-23-08). An important step is to create a
> range of public spheres that allows everybody to move between them and
> build an own opinion this way. As far as a see, five institutions would
> be good starter: Capitalistic media, civic media, public broadcasting
> (fee funded), state media and scientific media (open access only). Of
> course, the institutions need to be clearly separated. So: No tax money
> whatsoever for capitalistic media, no ads in public broadcasting and so on.
>
> Do you think a structure like that would support groups in growing
> inward and support the circulation of truths that are owned by small
> groups?
>
> All the best,
>
> Christian.
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