Finding The Antidote to Disaster Nationalism with #RichardSeymour, who argues that crises— climate disasters, economic shocks—are exploited by nationalist forces to strengthen state power, scapegoat outsiders, and entrench capitalist interests. He critiques neoliberalism and advocates an #Ecosocialist alternative.
#SamSeder #EmmaVigeland #MajorityReport #Culture #Politics #Economics #Ecosystem #Permaculture #SolarPunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LcWjzFPhGs
#richardSeymour
"Rêver ensemble," #houriabouteldja #RichardSeymour https://youtu.be/6fEYw09gysw?si=itp2cMeSEc0PMzwG
I know a lot of people have beef with #TheGuardian coz of Corbyn or whatever, but I support it as it is literally the only news outlet in the UK that will feature voices such as #ArwaMahdawi, #GeorgeMonbiot, #OwenJones, #JohnHarris, #NesrineMalik, #RichardSeymour and others
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/10/journalism-values-reader-support-trump-musk
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.pluralistic.net@web.brid.gy
2024-11-25Pluralistic: The far right grows through "disaster fantasies" (25 Nov 2024)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/
Some thoughts about Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism
I felt this was a really important book but there’s a risk it could be misconstrued. A core element of the argument is far from new: complex socioeconomic forces are prone to coalesce into the figure of enemies who then organise the free-floating anxiety. My reference points for this idea are, in different ways, Arendt, Zizek and Butler. Seymour’s reference points are the political sociology and social psychology of fascism. It’s an idea we should be attending to closely at the moment, but it’s not a new argument.
I can see how some readers might come away feeling Seymour is reinventing the wheel here and missing the real contribution he’s making. What I think is novel and timely is how Seymour combines this familiar argument with three other factors:
- The role of social platforms in organising this demonology, as well as creating incentives for people to profit off the process.
- The sociology of disasters as well as the particular energy it lends to demonology, as an attempt to cope with something overwhelming.
- The spiralling proliferation of such disasters on a dying planet, as well as what this means for those first two mechanisms.
I want to better understand how he sees the connections between slow motion disasters like austerity and immediate catastrophes such as devastating wild fires. In essence I think he’s saying that the platformisation of social life organises the anxiety which emerges from these disasters, as well as enabling people to profit from it at all levels from local true believers through to grifter influencers and aspiring despots. The really terrifying thing is the feedback loops this opens up, which as he points out are not new when you crack open the shell of historical totalitarian societies, as well as what this means for the possibility of constraining spiralling diasters.
#civilisationalCollapse #climateCrisis #farRight #fascism #postPandemicCivics #richardSeymour
Epidemiological self-consciousness and the suddenly countercultural status of the sovereign individual
From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1222:
In the time of the pandemic, we learned to see ourselves as a potential risk to other people, a stance that required personal sacrifices. The sovereign individual became abruptly countercultural. The panicked sense of lost sovereignty resonated with the prevailing sociophobia of the far right, entailed in the assertion that any communal abridgment of individual freedoms is despotic: ‘social distancing is communism’ and ‘masks are muzzles’.
A process enacted through a “conversion-machine, transforming panic over threatened individualism into authoritarian desire”: what Elon Musk has been consumed by and what he seeks to build and expand?
#antiVax #conspiracy #covid #elonMusk #postPandemicCivics #richardSeymour
Liberal conspiracism and the parts of the psyche that media literacy training doesn’t touch
From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1107:
If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition.
I wrote extensively in The Public and the Platforms (largely drawing on Noortje Marres and Will Davies) about the limits of relying on facts to support deliberation in the public sphere when the institution of factfulness (a neutral representation that has been produced by competent experts in a disinterested way) has unravelled.
I’m trying to decide if the psychoanalytical case Seymour is making here constitutes an extension of this argument or an alternative to it. Is factfulness an institution or is it a fantasy? Is it one fantasy (those-who-know working on behalf of all of us) being replaced by other, darker and more enjoyable fantasies? It’s a very useful time for Seymour to have published this book, particularly as liberal conspiracism seems to have gone into overdrive since the US election. From loc 1,066:
Wherever conspiracy theories suddenly appear, we wonder: Who is behind this? Who is pulling the strings? We become conspiracy theorists about conspiracy theories. We think, to use the terms of journalist Alexi Mostrous, that conspiracists can be divided between ‘victims’ and ‘manipulators’.28 The wishful implication is that there are cynical producers and gullible consumers. Those who intentionally mislead, for profit or attention, and those who are innocently misled. The latter can be saved if only we can discredit the former. Perhaps when mass media was a one-way system, and propaganda worked on the principle of suggestion, this was plausible.
There was always something epistemically dubious about diagnoses of post-truth were made, given the tendency to ascribe the breakdown of a previously functioning system to an outside agent. I’ve written in a couple of places about this as a form of liberal populism: e.g. everything was working fine in the public sphere until those dastardly Russians came along and tricked the population into voting for Brexit. But it was also incipient in the whole notion of conspiracism traditionally construed, in the way Seymour points to here.
The psychoanalytical reading of conspiracism suggests we should not see a growth of liberal conspiracism as more people being dragged into the post-truth vortex, but rather more people insisting on their right to the jouissance that conspiracies offer. Why should the Republicans have all the fun? Why should we obey the law, remain within the boundaries of ‘truth’ and moderate our responses? Why can’t we just make shit up too? Isn’t it more satisfying to imagine that Musk stole the election with Starlink than facing up to the possibility of structural, even terminal, weaknesses with the organising mechanisms which constitute the Democratic party?
#conspiracism #conspiracy #conspiracyTheory #electionDenial #elections #Jouissance #NoortjeMarres #PostNeoliberalCivics #postPandemicCivics #postTruth #publicAndTheirPlatforms #richardSeymour #WillDavies
Far-right leaders are winning across the globe. Blaming ‘the economy’ or ‘the left-behinds’ won’t cut it | Richard Seymour | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/far-right-leaders-economy-voters
Far-right leaders are winning across the globe. Blaming ‘the economy’ or ‘the left-behinds’ won’t cut it | Richard Seymour | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/far-right-leaders-economy-voters
Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge”. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.
#farright #disasterNationalism #fascism #MAGA #pogroms #richardSeymour
This is fascinating from Richard Seymour on the addictive cycles of threat and release, the excitement of being able to hit back at phobic objects, underpinning the contemporary far-right. He’s arguing that far-right formations are an emergent solution to the libidinal evisceration which late capitalism is giving rise to. Anger as a vector of meaning in a dying world which can’t provide the parameters in which a meaningful life would be possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qy943q1Rsk
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/23/the-demons-in-your-head-are-real-and-you-can-kill-them/
From Richard Seymour’s Patreon yesterday:
Specifically, we need to consider, in the context of relentless social comparison, steepening class inequality, a culture of extolment of winners and sadism toward losers, and of the increasingly toxic psychological consequences of failure, the persecutory and vengeful passions secreted by the social body. Rather than simply blaming disinformation, or scapegoating Russian interference or the ‘Israel lobby’, we need to think about how disinformation campaigns leverage those wayward passions, and turn them into political weapons. We need to consider how the engorged excitement of these rioters, their enthralment at the spectre of catastrophe and annihilation, is in part an alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression borne of a dying civilization.
As he puts it earlier in the essay, “we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion” because it’s not a factual phenomenon. He’s making a subtle point here about the need to recognise social platforms, what he calls the social industry, without centring it. These are not mechanisms of social control, allowing shadowy foreign actors to intervene on a previously harmonious whole (to invoke what I argued here is a now familiar form of liberal populism), but rather generative mechanisms through which passions are stoked and mobilised. With a thin and distributed organisational layer riding them into public assembly.
An observation he made elsewhere that contemporary fascism has given up on the future has stuck with me. This is not the desire for a future purified of discord that was the libidinal mechanism of classical fascism, ultimately an image of what can be if only we remove what shouldn’t be, but rather a drive based response to the affects of contemporary social decay. How do we explain where, as Seymour puts it, “a critical mass of young men ready for the adventure of violence” comes from in the first place?
#capitalism #conspiracy #farRight #fascism #liberalPopulism #libidinalEconomy #neoliberalism #populism #postNeoliberalCivics #richardSeymour
Over the last few days I’ve been thinking back to this Richard Seymour piece about the strange connections between centrists and the far-right:
Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of his border agenda, Macron’s government has tried to outflank Le Pen by, for example, calling her soft on Islam and fulminating about “Islamo-gauchisme”. This is a weird symbiosis, in which both the hard-centre and the far-right thrive on cultivating hopelessness and punitive desires: sado-pessimism. It legitimises the far-right, who take the win and demand more
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/07/the-rise-of-disaster-nationalism
There’s a long history of new Labour doing this, with the right flank of Starmer’s coalition now extending well into traditionally Conservative territory. Yes he’s called it “far-right thuggery” but I can’t help but wonder how the electoral landscape might be shaping tactical responses, with regards to for example recalling Parliament or going after Farage. My concern that Starmerism will lead the UK on a similar path to Macronism in France is growing with each passing day.
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/06/the-triangulation-of-centrists-emboldens-the-far-right/
#farRight #labout #liberalism #macron #populism #richardSeymour #riots #Starmer
Richard Seymour on what happens when centrists triangulate against the far-right in the interests of electoral pragmatism. The part in bold is particularly bleak:
Against all this, official liberalism has one move, which is to supplement its growth discourse by triangulating the far-right. Just as Biden had sought to neutralise Trump by appropriating parts of his border agenda, Macron’s government has tried to outflank Le Pen by, for example, calling her soft on Islam and fulminating about “Islamo-gauchisme”. This is a weird symbiosis, in which both the hard-centre and the far-right thrive on cultivating hopelessness and punitive desires: sado-pessimism. It legitimises the far-right, who take the win and demand more. Far-right voters aren’t placated because they’re addicted to the animating sense of threat. Meanwhile, liberal critique is neutralised, a fatalistic attitude to racism is engrained, and society is inured to the latest erosion of civilised norms. This is, after all, the pattern on which the far-right has thrived: the steady and accelerating involution of liberal civilization. There is no reason to assume this process has peaked, or that democracy will stabilise given the stresses the climate crisis will place on the system.
What may halt this process is not cynical appeal to self-interest or pandering to vengeful passions, but an equal and opposite force that eschews the pseudo-rebellion of the far-right for a real rebellion. Notably, the New Popular Front’s success in France was achieved with a programme that addresses people’s immediate needs through higher wages and price controls while attending to more collective, long-term desires. It defended migrants, for example, and opposed Islamophobia. It supported climate measures, a ceasefire in Gaza and recognition of Palestine. The programme will be hard to realise, and the Left will be resisted by those in power – but it cut through the hopeless synergy of hard-centre and far-right and showed that punitive nationalism does not enjoy anything like a monopoly on public desires.
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/07/the-rise-of-disaster-nationalism
I hope Labour won’t do this but it’s hard not to infer they will, particularly if the recomposition of the right (i.e. a more or less functional alliance between Conservatives and Reform) happens more quickly than expected. Perhaps Macron’s fate will illustrate how short-sighted this is as an electoral strategy?
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/22/the-political-economy-of-hoplessness/
#centrism #farRight #hope #hopelessness #labour #macron #richardSeymour
Commendably referenced & evidenced piece on #lockdowns from the usually-reliable #RichardSeymour
Three years on, there is a new generation of lockdown sceptics – and they’re rewriting history
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/23/lockdown-sceptics-history-academics-left-covid?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
#RichardSeymour
"I think somebody famously put it: the message of accounts on Instagram is I had a better holiday than you, on Facebook it's my children are better than yours, and on #Twitter it's my ideology has killed less people than your ideology."
"What is it about #SocialMedia that turns us into such objectionable creatures? [...] Ash is joined by #RichardSeymour, author of #TheTwitteringMachine."
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