further to the post about retro politics and Republicanism versus the "reality-based community", here's a column by the Guardian's Gary Younge based around that infamous phrase.


"Finally it appears defeat has sobered some of them up, forcing a rift between those willing to engage with the world as it is and others who prefer dystopian visions, woven from whole cloth."

the nub is "the word as it is", which is  capitalist realism / managerialism / incrementalism / pragmatism / "the end of history / "centuries of boredom"* 1

yes, paranoid-conspiracy, dystopian-apocalyptic  -isms are the reactionary version of "is and ought", but there are plenty of utopian versions of this kind of wishful politics -- not based in restorative nostalgia, but in fictive futurism



* 1 “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”--Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?

For the curious, here's a video of me giving a talk on DIY culture (and the DIYstopia) at Incubate, in Tilburg, earlier this autumn

And here's the talk giving immediately after, by Mark Fisher

And later that weekend, a presentation by Robert Levine, about his book Free Ride, a very sharply argued defence of copyright as a system that at least offers some kind of recompense for culture-workers

And from discourse fever to schlager fever --  De Deurzakkers helping everybody let off some steam at the Incubate after party at the club Little Devil in Tilburg

retro politics (part 34)

The schadenfreude glow has yet to fade completely...   the joy (the relief) of seeing

"the reality-evading bubble" burst, the flood of "real knowable facts out there" break through the ideological levee that protects the "reality-distortion field" that is Republicanism "epistemic closure"

All the justifiably gleeful scorn on our side ("enconsced in an alternate reality",   "triumph of ideology over the real world",  "superglued to the past" ,“retro in-the-bubble ideas”) sent me back to that infamous quote

You know the quote, the one where the term "reality-based community" was first uttered in public earshot: Ron Suskind's 2004 New York Times Magazine article on George W. Bush... the passage where he's talking to an aide, a very high up one (some believe it was Rove)...

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Chilling stuff

And yet...

Be honest now-- shove to one side the fact that it's (probably) Rove who said that...  forget if you can the context of  the Iraq War... 

Isn’t there a tiny bit of you that thrills to the idea in that quote? The idea of being History's actors...  not subject to reality, but bending it to your will...  Isn't it actually reminiscent of that saying about how "the point is not to understand the world, but to change it"?

Regardless of the ends that this particular historical manifestation of will to power/will to truth  directed itself towards... the underlying idea there is a larger conception of politics than the one (modest improvements in things-as-they-are) envisioned (visionlessly) by the side I'm so very very glad won the last election (the sensible side, the sane side) 

One of the things that perplexes people on the Left about heartland middle-or-low income Republican voters is why they vote against their own economic interests, why they side with plutocracy and corporations...  as in. What's The Matter With Kansas?...  but (once again disregarding the reactionary nature of those ideals and value from our point of view) surely voting for something bigger than or just other than your narrow economic interests, that's what politics should be, right?

Demographics-derived calculus of  the Silver sort is a factsist regime that can't really account for things like tidal surges of fervour or interest-transcending idealism... 

"The refusal to let facts get in the way" --  it sounds really bad, so pernicious. But then wasn't that what civil rights was? What abolitionism was?

Or what a counterculture is: the refusal of the limits of reality as currently understood and accepted.


The difference is: the counterculture defeated in the last election was refusing reality in the name of a past that never really was....    But (c.f. Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism) it is possible for countercultures to refuse reality, to fly in the face of "facts",  in the name of a future that could be.