George Dafermos' Weblog

28 January 2004

barbarians blogging from the ivory tower

here's a piece on the blogging that has infiltrated the ivory tower of rotten politics amd liberated the information flows to and fro davos. couldn't help but notice that the author, Thomas Crampton, likens bloggers to barbarians - and make no mistake - barbarians have been increasingly portrayed as residing at the strategic annex of global capitalism and its nemesis, according to leading thinkers of political philosophy.

while reflecting upon the significance of the barbarians that nietzsche had himself envisioned and admired when he wrote "problem: wher are the new barbarians of the twentieth century? obviously, they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises", negri and hardt invite barbarians to crash the empire as barbarians are the only ones equipped to "destroy with an affirmative violence and trace new paths of life through their own material existence" (pp.215). of course, it should be noted that violent disobedience is not the point of negri and hardt here; rather, they seek to emphasise that barbarians are capable of begining anew, to actually begin from the new, while our world is suffering from a hallucination centred around the perception that the world has come to an eternal end - how else can we interpret postmodernity as it is by itself a contradiction in terms (what comes after post?) and the current phase of capitalism constantly re-inforces an idea and logic of perpetual continuity. indeed, if the end of history and the last man are upon us, then only a new breed of barbarias can invent the *new space*, which is the respose to the all encompassing logic that governs the empire, that is the non-place of exploitation.

we can also follow the barbarianism thread back to castoriades, (who also wrote that we need to invent new forms of social life), and his socialism ou barbarie team and journal (socialism or barbarianism), the ideas of which played a critical role in the may 68 rebellion in france. the most important element in castoriades' method is conscious choice among alternatives and courses of history - therefore, he wants these barbarians to arrive, and he doesn't claim that this emergent barbarianism is inevitable. nonetheless, so far as these barbarians are connected to autonomy and self-rule, in both individual and social senses, and however violent the passage to autonomy and self-rule, it passes through barbarianism.

On the other hand, negri and hardt (who regard mass worker nomadism and labour mobility in abstract, and posthuman bodies fusing machine, man and nature in particular, as the first and foremost evidence toward this transformative passage of humanity) claim that this barbarianism, and the wider notion of antropolgocial exodus (in which barbarianism is embedded) is still very ambiguous, and as such, it may be co-opted by imperial sovereignty or leave no resilient structures behind because the very methods of an all encopassing control are also based upon hybridization and mutation (like anthropological exodus).

so, after all this long digression, i come to ask are bloggers the new barbarians? and have they revolutionalised the mode of relations inside davos through blogging davos, or is it that blogging is being co-opted by the existing structures of control, alienation, and exclusivity that davos itself is designed to promote and sustain?

joi ito has kickstarted the discussion but i remember someone in the blogo-jungle saying that joi's blogging of davos from davos is not a discussion, but a monologue which has to ask for permission before posting (was it you happy tutor?). bear with me and we shall see.

UPDATE 1
it wasn't the happy tutor. it was tom matrullo here

via wirearchy

5:55:33 PM

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