...the Latins invented 'society' to describe their aspirations for collective order, the word they used had as its root sekw-, meaning to follow. If anyone was attacked, the others agreed to support them in battle. The hierarchy was temporary. Well so too on Twitter. The idea of society as a state with fixed boundaries came a lot later. The new social networks are personal and unequal; they often have a commercial feel that puts off many intellectuals. But there is something exciting going on that it would pay us to understand...well-trod territory by numerous techno-visionaries, among others, trying to capture the zeitgeist -- the recognition that something is happening -- and that there is more to be written, if not directed; i like the way cowen put it recently:
...to our own detriment. As human beings, we are prone to focus on very dramatic, visible events... of good guys versus bad guys and... to neglect the underlying forces that improve life in small, hard-to-observe ways, culminating in important changes...probably the best practitioner of identifying and, uh, hermeneutically unifying 'the underlying forces' (in my mind!) was gellner, like (in my intellectual development) i've (sub)consciously been trying to fill out an imaginary addendum to plough, sword and book (or looking for others to do so ;) about how the internet is rewiring the industrial-age institutions of 'production, coercion and cognition' that, very broadly speaking, would be something along the lines of 'the social' over 'the economic' with 'information' replacing 'money' in terms of primacy and then in turn how that is affecting the power structures of 'the political' (given to 'the ideological'?) ... or something!
In the midst of the current crisis, which will be long and protracted, many on the left want to return to the golden age of public education. They naïvely imagine that the crisis of the present is an opportunity to demand the return of the past. But social programs that depended upon high profit rates and vigorous economic growth are gone. We cannot be tempted to make futile grabs at the irretrievable while ignoring the obvious fact that there can be no autonomous "public university" in a capitalist society. The university is subject to the real crisis of capitalism, and capital does not require liberal education programs. The function of the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the changing needs of capital. The crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system. We live out the terminus of the very market logic upon which that system was founded. The only autonomy we can hope to attain exists beyond capitalism.and placed in a larger context:
What this means for our struggle is that we can't go backward. The old student struggles are the relics of a vanished world. In the 1960s, as the post-war boom was just beginning to unravel, radicals within the confines of the university understood that another world was possible. Fed up with technocratic management, wanting to break the chains of a conformist society, and rejecting alienated work as unnecessary in an age of abundance, students tried to align themselves with radical sections of the working class. But their mode of radicalization, too tenuously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because their resistance to the Vietnam war focalized critique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon its exploitation of domestic labor, students were easily split off from a working class facing different problems. In the twilight era of the post-war boom, the university was not subsumed by capital to the degree that it is now, and students were not as intensively proletarianized by debt and a devastated labor market.
That is why our struggle is fundamentally different. The poverty of student life has become terminal: there is no promised exit. If the economic crisis of the 1970s emerged to break the back of the political crisis of the 1960s, the fact that today the economic crisis precedes the coming political uprising means we may finally supersede the cooptation and neutralization of those past struggles. There will be no return to normal.
...there would seem to be two possibilities inherent in the current financial crisis: post-Bretton Woods capital has erred by its primary reliance on a money form and accompanying social bond — credit and debt, respectively — that are incompatible with it, and so a readjustment, a reversion, will be necessary; or capital's overcoming of the current crisis will represent not simply surpassing a limit but also the crossing of a threshold — the integration of financialization into a new capitalist assemblage.viz. kropotkin's spirit of revolt:
The social-democratic calls for a new deal and the locating of debt as capitalism's dirty little secret are, of course, reterritorializing demands banking on the former solution, a weird kind of desire to conserve an ontology that no longer exists. The latter, though, seems the more likely solution, one that will, as Melinda Cooper and Angela Mitropoulos note, be based on and pave the way for the "renewed deterritorialisation of capital flows on another scale and another basis." If capital is able to overcome the first huge crisis in financialization, it will be, according to Graeber's scheme, an epoch-making change. It will also, as both Cooper and Mitropoulos and Graeber agree, be achieved in blood: "there is no possibility of a peaceful exit" from the current crisis because of "the absolutely crucial role of violence in defining the very terms by which we imagine both 'society' and 'markets' - in fact, many of our most elementary ideas of freedom..."
There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling atmosphere of prejudice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the constitution of the State, of the laws of social equilibrium, of the political and economic interrelations of citizens, can hold out no longer against the implacable criticism which is daily undermining them whenever occasion arises, — in drawing room as in cabaret, in the writings of philosophers as in daily conversation. Political, economic, and social institutions are crumbling; the social structure, having become uninhabitable, is hindering, even preventing the development of the seeds which are being propagated within its damaged walls and being brought forth around them.indeed :P
The need for a new life becomes apparent.
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I'm not trying to be all pissy, but it read to me like "the internet is great! People do stuff on the internet, we (anthropologists) should study it and use it more! It really is great!" Seriously asking, is there a point I missed?
Anthropologists already are studying this, he's aware of it. I don't know, who is supposed to read this piece and what are they supposed to take from it? Old guy uses new technology? Young people use new technology more than old people? The internet is kind of a big deal?
posted by smoke at 5:29 AM on January 9, 2010 [1 favorite]