Friday 15 April 2011

Towards a Radical Anti-Capitalist Schizophrenia?

3 comments:

  1. "In a fragmented cultural milieu, capitalist, consumer culture can thrive unopposed." this has seemed to me to be one of the biggest dangers of the current cultural fragmentation that has occurred around the world, due to such factors as increasing amounts of choices and the filtering of social life into increasingly granular stratifications. those identity politics are playing out in frightening ways in the USA with the tea party and religious fanaticism drowning out the voices of a "reasonable" middle class. the financial elite, with their isolated enclaves and exclusive educational institutions reinforce this sense of US vs THEM. this is one of the reasons i used to get so tweaky when talking about facebook. it is yet another factor in creating exclusive networks (i believe the networks tend towards a de facto exclusivity, rather than this misguided techno-utopian view that our connections are becoming more and more inclusive). i think back to my experiences trying to organize musicians through on-line networks, and comparing it to the days of meeting some folks down at the record store and responding to hand-drawn signs looking for other musicians, and there is something important that gets lost in the translation. and it's not just the network itself, but the way that the organization and transmission of information changes the way we respond to and interpret the semiotic meanings. deleuze was a brilliant theorist in many ways and i think he definitely captured a lot of this stuff through his theoretical explorations.

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  2. i think maybe my main critique of the facebook style of social networking is that it fixes and strengthens an identity based interchange. this is, to my thinking, the complete opposite of what a potentially free-flowing interchange of information would need to create a non-hierarchical, non-identity based communication network. that perhaps we are attached, but as thinking minds, language and gesture, deterritorialized from our class/location/advertising preferences/etc. anything that bonds us more inextricably with our "identity" i find to be at cross-purposes to a genuine territory for true learning and evolution.

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  3. Interesting thoughts my friend.
    Regards/

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