Re: <nettime> So what's the use of art, theory, activism? OR the public sphere?

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

Allan Siegel wrote:

"It seems to me that THE LOCAL is an intrinsic starting point for political
activism because the local is a critical discursive zone where people, a
public, are able to discuss and act, most directly, on the issues and
conditions that impact their lives. The local in this sense is a nascent
form of the public sphere."

I like this discussion of local space vs public sphere, it helps me situate
myself in contemporary society. That's exactly what theory's good for.

However, rather than a pacified local space in which neighbors from all
walks of life talk about matters of common concern, what I see emerging are
more intimate spaces of assembly - sometimes accidental, often intentional,
always based in the end on perceived affinities. It would be great to have
the pacified local dialogues between whomsoever, but the spaces of
intensity are more available and more real.

As the supposed transparency and universality of cosmopolitan institutions
starts shutting down, spaces of intimacy reveal their impressive powers. A
gesture, a speech act, an art work is something very different when it is
received by twenty or thirty fully present people, as opposed to being
splash-cast over global networks staffed by normative mediators and
obsessional filterbots. Precisely because the intricacy of culture is now
going to flee the big arenas, our future lives may become extremely
interesting on the existential level, at least if you're not afraid to go
all the way. For the near future I predict, not just more angry and
resentful polarization, but something a lot more generative: what David
Graeber and David Wengrow call schismogenesis. It's a deliberate attempt to
become other, to transform one's social self in refusal of a contrary
attempt by the opposing side. Resistance against the new fascists will spur
this kind of creativity - hopefully to the kinds of counter-cultural
extremes that came out of Brazilian resistance to the dictatorship in the
'70s and '80s (to get a sense of that, see the book Guattari in Brazil, or
the exhibition Fullgas that was recently in Rio).

Fpr those who would've rather gone ahead with comfortable global
technocratic middle-class culture, complete with climate change and
genocide and all the rest, well, fine, whatever. You can have it like any
other fantasy, its death-in-life will be long. I'll take the gaze of twenty
people seeking the truth right now, and knowing that it is always both
contingent and double-edged.

So local/intimate spaces are crucially important, but one can ask whether
they will replace what was formerly called the public sphere? Or maybe
somehow grow into a new version of it? I don't think so, because these
things are not the same. What artists and activists often call "public
space" - the open space of the street where, for a moment, anything could
happen - is a far cry from the formalized public sphere, which is really a
set of institutions for shaping norms and mediating conflicts. Habermas,
whose work was so influential on the design of EU institutions, actually
based his universal concept on the specifically European nineteenth-century
bourgeois public sphere, with its core institutions of Art, Law, Science
and Property, where the ultimate mediator was supposed to be Reason. Across
the twentieth century, efforts were made to expand this class-bound concept
of the bourgeois or urban public sphere to social-democratic institutions
of fully national scope, finally culminating in today's hollowed-out
continental and global bureaucracies. The idealization of the public sphere
derives from the extravagant claim that all conflicts, at all scales, can
be effectively resolved by the application of reason within legitimate
institutional bounds.

No one believes that anymore. What we have lost over the past twenty years
is both the normative faith in democracy, and the cultural capacity of
post-WWII global institutions to stabilize economic and political life.
Intimate spaces, where people risk appearing before each other's gaze, have
tremendous ethical and spiritual value, precisely because they are not
normative, they do not reduce singular potentials to a cliche or a law of
averages. But you can't derive any figure of justice from such
existentializing experiences.

The challenge, in my view, is to embrace the intensity, to go ahead with
the schismogenesis, and yet remain receptive to whatever emerges in the way
of new attempts to settle conflicts across multiplying lines of difference.
Because as anyone can see, the post-public sphere conflicts are already
horrific and they are going to get worse. Very soon they will include
climate change consequences alongside international war and local revolt.
We will all be forced out of our chosen selves by the pressures of urgency.
So whoever cultivates difference had better also think a lot about the
spaces where differences meet.

best to all, Brian

On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 6:40 AM allan siegel via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> *Louis* mentions, "I'd suggest that how we are assembling our worlds
> around "art" and "activism" and especially "theory" are probably not
> serving us the way they use to. For whom? To whom?" and *Brian*, "I am
> now an elder, who must turn experience - even the experience of failures
> - into something valuable for present and coming generations. Resistance
> happens in the streets, but not only." *Felix*, says, "The political
> center abandoned the notion of the public sphere in the 1990s."
> *Andreas*, provides another vantage point, "I believe that there is a
> connection between the political organization of postwar democracies and
> the way in which their public spheres were structured (for instance
> through large-scale public and private media monopolies)."and back to
> *Stella's* item that, "Strong local units are able to materially and
> discursively resist the imposition of authority from outside."
>
>   Working backwards from Stella’s point: It seems to me that THE LOCAL
> is an intrinsic starting point for political activism because the local
> is a critical discursive zone where people, a public, are able to
> discuss and act, most directly, on the issues and conditions that impact
> their lives. The local in this sense is a nascent form of the public
> sphere.
>
>   In the classical realm, which Hannah Arendt discussed, the local realm
> is the agora, a model of the public sphere. A multi-functional social
> space that was ‘the space of appearances’ where people came together to
> discuss and also if necessary to act. For Arendt political discourse and
> action seem to be inseparable. If we look globally, and closely, at
> postwar social movements (a long list) this connection between discourse
> and action enabled often inextricable and profound social and political
> changes
>   With examples that begin to appear from 1945 forward (and we could
> easily look at previous centuries) the public sphere is not only one
> specific social space as in Habermas’ study but rather a variety of
> social spaces according to Nancy Fraser’s important critique of
> Habermas. Accordingly, there are a multiplicity of discursive zones from
> which ideas become transformed in to political acts and social movements.
>
> The connections between the so-called 'political center' and the
> 'political organization of postwar democracies' brings us into the
> present neoliberal miasma within which the dimensions of the public
> sphere range from the Occupy, MeToo, and BLM movements to Facebook and
> TikTok. Simply put, the public sphere is not static or necessarily one
> dimensional and is capable of enabling a broad range of political and
> economic programs within which 'art' can appear as an essential and
> integral element.
> Louis' questions, "For whom? To whom?" can be approached first by
> looking at From Whom? Meaning, from which positions and/or places, does
> ‘art, theory and activism’  originate? What do our local individual
> ‘units/collectives’  look like and what are their connections (if any)
> to some variation of a "public sphere"? Meaning, am I part of some
> discursive zone? And, BTW, does Nettime count as a public sphere? Does
> Stella’s definition of a local unit include virtual communities like
> Nettime? And, how do forms of 'resistance' that ferment within virtual
> communities translate into activism…? This becomes a critical question
> if we are not to be swallowed within the Neoliberal Miasma or fenced
> within Trumpist ghettos.
> Best
>
> Allan
> --
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