Brian Holmes: Re: Structured Chaos
Greetings to all, I'm Brian Holmes, my simplest self-description is probably freelance writer and culture critic; I'll be posting mostly from Chicago and Paris.
I'm glad to be part of this latest forum that Jordan and his many partners have organized. As in each chance at world-wide communication and debate there is a hope to really get somewhere, not just interesting, but useful, vital for those of us participating and perhaps even for others, if we can reach insights that are enabling, that can be shared widely and that can help constitute a new common sense and a new constructive rationality, based on principles of inter-cultural respect quite different from the disastrous patterns of exploitation and conflict that now hold sway in the world.
The excerpt we've just received from Alain Joxe's book "Empire of Disorder" (2002) speaks of the "dynamic morphology" imposed on the world-system by the USA since 1989. From Joxe's perspective the world map looks like this: "an overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis, zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide."
From my persepctive in Chicago right now, I find it important to stress that the overdeveloped core and the free-market constellations he mentions do not necessarily equate with democracy anymore. We can see this immediately in the USA, since the Military Commissions Act has been signed into law just a few days ago, suspending both habeas corpus rights and aspects of the Geneva Convention against the use of torture for anyone arbitrarily designated by the Eecutive branch (and particularly the Department of Defense) as an "unlawful enemy combatant." What has been most worrying here is the relative lack of protest or palpable shock and concern at a development which constitutes a major step toward a new kind of fascism, what I call "liberal fascism" due both to its reliance on the rhetoric of freedom, and to the highly individualized nature of the repressive technologies whereby it claims to insure individual security. Why this lack of effective public outcry in the USA?
But one could also ask, why such a lack of public outcry in France, after the banlieue riots of November 2005, which revealed as clearly as possible the gradual slippage toward "social wastelands" on the edges of the major French cities? Why is nothing substantial being done about this problem? Why does the major French socialist candidate for the upcoming presidential elections have nothing better to offer than tough security mesures for youthful delinquents? I could also quote examples of recent British political rhetoric about the necessary suspension of certain freedoms; and these just happen to be the core societies with which I am somewhat familiar.
It may be useful to add to Joxe's concept of structured chaos a further concept developed by the Retort group in the USA, authors of the book "Afflicted Powers." They believe that the maintenance of the present form of state power depends both on the existence of "failed states" on the edges of the world-system, and of "weak citizenship" in the core areas. Even if I don't agree with everything in the book, this is a key concept. I quote from the chapter on "The State, the Spectacle and September 11":
"The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four. Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention - an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, 'individually') into a deadly simulacrum of community."
What can artists and intellectuals due to overcome this powerless condition of civil society, which so easily allows the slide toward liberal fascism? What can *we* do? I hope this will be a central question of the forum. Only by overcoming the increasingly prevalent affliction of weak citizenship can we hope to exercise a positive influence in the world, and not simply serve as inputs for a sophisticated simulacrum or ghost of what was formerly conceived as "the public sphere."
best to all,
>Brian Holmes
I'm glad to be part of this latest forum that Jordan and his many partners have organized. As in each chance at world-wide communication and debate there is a hope to really get somewhere, not just interesting, but useful, vital for those of us participating and perhaps even for others, if we can reach insights that are enabling, that can be shared widely and that can help constitute a new common sense and a new constructive rationality, based on principles of inter-cultural respect quite different from the disastrous patterns of exploitation and conflict that now hold sway in the world.
The excerpt we've just received from Alain Joxe's book "Empire of Disorder" (2002) speaks of the "dynamic morphology" imposed on the world-system by the USA since 1989. From Joxe's perspective the world map looks like this: "an overdeveloped core, zones forming constellations of democracy or free market clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by flexible or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in crisis, zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid genocide."
From my persepctive in Chicago right now, I find it important to stress that the overdeveloped core and the free-market constellations he mentions do not necessarily equate with democracy anymore. We can see this immediately in the USA, since the Military Commissions Act has been signed into law just a few days ago, suspending both habeas corpus rights and aspects of the Geneva Convention against the use of torture for anyone arbitrarily designated by the Eecutive branch (and particularly the Department of Defense) as an "unlawful enemy combatant." What has been most worrying here is the relative lack of protest or palpable shock and concern at a development which constitutes a major step toward a new kind of fascism, what I call "liberal fascism" due both to its reliance on the rhetoric of freedom, and to the highly individualized nature of the repressive technologies whereby it claims to insure individual security. Why this lack of effective public outcry in the USA?
But one could also ask, why such a lack of public outcry in France, after the banlieue riots of November 2005, which revealed as clearly as possible the gradual slippage toward "social wastelands" on the edges of the major French cities? Why is nothing substantial being done about this problem? Why does the major French socialist candidate for the upcoming presidential elections have nothing better to offer than tough security mesures for youthful delinquents? I could also quote examples of recent British political rhetoric about the necessary suspension of certain freedoms; and these just happen to be the core societies with which I am somewhat familiar.
It may be useful to add to Joxe's concept of structured chaos a further concept developed by the Retort group in the USA, authors of the book "Afflicted Powers." They believe that the maintenance of the present form of state power depends both on the existence of "failed states" on the edges of the world-system, and of "weak citizenship" in the core areas. Even if I don't agree with everything in the book, this is a key concept. I quote from the chapter on "The State, the Spectacle and September 11":
"The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four. Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention - an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, 'individually') into a deadly simulacrum of community."
What can artists and intellectuals due to overcome this powerless condition of civil society, which so easily allows the slide toward liberal fascism? What can *we* do? I hope this will be a central question of the forum. Only by overcoming the increasingly prevalent affliction of weak citizenship can we hope to exercise a positive influence in the world, and not simply serve as inputs for a sophisticated simulacrum or ghost of what was formerly conceived as "the public sphere."
best to all,
>Brian Holmes