File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0203, message 80


Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 16:18:39 +1000
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Without freedom, the terrorists have won


Eric/All,

Isn't it interesting, that with all the good things said and done by the
philosophers cited, the situation of children and young adults against
tanks, helicopters, rockets, and bulldozers, is portrayed by terror warriors
and the media  mavens as a videogame.  Like other national entertainments it
is a
matter of scores, where kill ratios, body counts,  playing by the rules,
etc.
are of great importance?

regards,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> Sheena,
>
> The message from you had a date of 1/5/1904. Do you have a time machine?
>
> I enjoyed reading the cross-posting. What is the SI web site it came from?
>
> I definitely would encourage more participation from 'beyond'.
>
> I certainly think the situationists are relevant to today's politics and
> although Lyotard wasn't involved directly with them, as a one-time member
> of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, he certainly had close ties with the
> general movement that led to May 68 in France. His whole legacy to me is
> about creating a radical politics in the midst of a relativistic,
> pluralistic, so-called "end of ideology" epoch that ends with a whimper in
> the triumph of neo-liberalism.
>
> Unlike Marxism and traditional -AT-narchy which are tied to metanarratives of
> liberation and which see 'humanity' as emerging into a final state of
> no-state (where the state is either smashed or withers away), a kind of
> fairy tale about the happy ending of history that somehow legitimizes all
> that has gone before; Lyotard creates a radical, open politics without the
> pieties of a philosophy of history that may serve as a god to guide it.
> For Lyotard, resistance without a legitimizing goal, like judgement
without
> criteria, is one of the marks of the political.
>
> In this respect, I think an interesting comparison could be made between
> Lyotard and autonomists like the early Negri. The latter argued that the
> worker is not merely a victim of capitalism imposition, the opposite is
> really true. Through their resistance and refusal of 'labor', the workers
> create innovation, paralogical responses and enact new forms of historical
> change to which the ruler must then react in new ways to contain. It is
> this dynamic of ongoing struggle and conflict between heterogeneous realms
> that makes history. This development has led up to the postmodern global
> society that is now in the process of emerging today.
>
> My reading of Lyotard is that he agrees implicitly with much of this
> analysis even though he critiques the idealizations still contained in the
> concepts of autonomy and generalized creativity and he pokes fun at the
> theological overtones hidden in the notion that the weak are the ones who
> posses the real strength.
>
> However, there is certainly a new politics emerging today which owes much
> to the situationists, autonomists, anarchists as well as to philosophies
> such as those of Foucault, Negri, Deleuze and Lyotard. Without attempting
> to reduce their complexities into mere planks in a political program, I
> would say that the globalist slogan of "free work, free borders, free
> information" says much about the new globalist society that is currently
> emerging despite the reactionary attempts of those anti-globalist forces
> who want to restrict the scope of globalism to the mere free flows of
> imposed capital.
>
> The Republicans are right when they talk about the potential of
> volunteerism as a means to transform society. However, it is difficult to
> get people to volunteer when they are working two or more jobs and still
> living in poverty. Imagine a world in which the need to work becomes
> greatly reduced, then people could then begin to create lives beyond
> necessity without the strictures of a market.  As just one example of
this,
> think of all the artists who are currently stuck doing temp work for low
> wages and no benefits (and everyone is an artist as Joseph Beuys once
> said).  If they no longer where consumed with making a living, they would
> then have the freedom to work on creating a living  instead - living
> theatre, local cinema, virtual environments, public art, New Babylon
> architecture. Such a revitalized local community would probably even
become
> a countervailing force against the need to passively endure the current
> elitist spectacle of the media. Then Hollywood and Fox News could simply
> wither away.
>
> Consider as well the related spectacle of a so-called global economy in
> which the work force is constrained under archaic modes of citizenship and
> militarized borders.  There are many so-called "foreign" workers in the
> United States who lack the right to vote and participate in the
communities
> they live in, are deprived of standard benefits and live in fear that they
> may end in being deported. At an even more insidious level, there are the
> exiled sweat-shop workers (many who are still children) who live in
factory
> compounds outsourced by corporations and experience lives reduced to
> nothing more than slave labor.
>
> Finally, under the name of intellectual property, we currently witness the
> spectacle of new information technologies whose basic principle is
> reproduction being constrained in their development and use by archaic
> notions of private property derived from feudal-early industrial culture.
> The simple fact is that, unlike traditional commodities like coal, steel,
> oil, wheat or corn, information has dynamic properties because the more it
> is used, the greater the realized benefit. By imposing an economic
monopoly
> on the free trade and exchange of information, the inherent wealth of the
> current society is being unduly restricted in order to service an elite
> cartel.  Imagine a world in which the multitude is no longer constrained
to
> lives of fear and poverty, free to do their own work, with access to the
> tools they need, and without the parochial constraints of borders. This
> would truly be the negation of the current negation, the refution of all
> those current nay-sayers who wring their hands and tell us nothing can be
> done; that is those famous words of nihilism spoken by Margaret Thatcher
> which continue to guide our so-called leaders - "there is no alternative".
>
> I agree with George W. Bush.  If we cannot create the conditions of
freedom
> in our lifetime, that means the terrorists have won.  I would also add,
> however, that his values are not my values. I can longer condone the
> immorality that insists upon nihilism, violence and death in the name of
> private profit uber alles. The god of neo-liberalism is dead, no matter
how
> many fundamentalist terrorists fight in his name, attempting to make the
> planet itself a suicide bomb to hasten the return of Jesus.
>
> eric
>
>
>
>



   

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