Here and there, the penny is dropping - the world has drifted into unreality, and people are concerned to know what it will take to come back to our senses.
“I’ve become increasingly convinced that it is the growing immaterialism of modern society that is generating many of our most destructive political impulses and divisions. As we increasingly move into a digital virtual world, we create an immaterial environment where the abstract starts to seem more real than reality. In the past, our frequent engagement with the materiality of work and play had served to bring us back ‘down to earth’ where our shared human commonalities might bridge political divides. But now our identities are increasingly whatever we wish to pretend they are, and politics has become just another spectator sport that we play on the Internet. This, I would suggest, is the logical outcome of the post- modern cultural turn: an environment where immaterial ideas are everything and material reality is largely irrelevant. Any politics that does not recognise and counter this growing immateriality is, I believe, unlikely to succeed in changing much of anything in the real World.”
Timothy J. LeCain, Neo-Materialism, Human Evolution, and the Future of Environmental History
I've been arguing this this very thing since the late 1980s, and I'm still urging leftists to come out of the linguistic and cultural turn and return to the reality of material relations and social connection. Something very striking about the electronic media mob of supposed radicals and revolutionaries is just how safe, tame, predictable, conformist, and beside the point they are. For all their relentless activism, they will change nothing of substance and inflict plenty that will stand in need of correction. People need to come back to their senses, because they are miles off at present.
The seeds that were sown in the 1980s are now being reaped, and it is a bitter harvest for conservatives and socialists alike. The anti-realism, constructivism, and linguistic turn of poststructuralism and postmodernism proceeded in lockstep with economic neoliberalism, the globalisation of economic relations, the transnational corporatisation of social and public life, and the hyperreality of the ICT revolution, in both economic and cultural terms.
The privatisation strategies of the 1980s ensured the corporatisation of public business. The liberalisation of economic activity was also the globalisation of economic relations, facilitated by the hyperreality of the ICT revolution. I detailed it all in my economics masters thesis of 1995. Conservatives and socialists fought a phoney war between free-markets and government regulation, private and public ownership, but all along it was the corporate form that was being extended. And electronic media was key to the whole process, rendering whole areas of socio-economic life, not to mention production and place, fluid and malleable. It stands to reason that that plasticity came to be extended to culture.
What is called 'Left' now is a cultural Left that has supplanted the old Social Left rooted in class, material relations, production, place, geography, organic cultures, and communities of character and practice. Which is to say that it is not Left at all, merely the 'progressive' wing of the new phase of capitalist development, involving abstraction, an attempt at remote control 'from above' (institutional regulation and imposition) and 'from without' (systemic imperatives arising from the accumulative dynamic). The cultural Left morphs very easily into a Corporate Left. When corporations are advancing your cause you can be sure that you are not part of the revolution. At present, politics is dominated by a cultural neo-liberalism and an economic neo-liberalism as two wings of the same corporate bird. A techno-feudalism under the corporate form is in the process of emerging, and activists and ideologues of all kinds are engaging in fighting the wrong fights.
And the people who identify as and who are identified as Left are anything but - they are in on the game, and succeeding very well at it. But if you think an egalitarian and democratic social order and economic life lies at the end of their victories you are deluded. They attack old aristocracies for one reason only - they see themselves and their kind as members of the new aristocracies. Rousseau saw the same process at work in the midst of the Enlightenment, Tocqueville saw the emergence of financial and manufacturing aristocracies in the midst of the industrialisation of the nineteenth century, and we can see the same thing at work in the mediated world of today.
I would just put the terms a little differently to this paper. Plenty is immaterial and intangible.
The slenderest knowledge of the highest things is more valuable than the most certain knowledge of more immediate and tangible things. Discuss.
And read my doctoral research notes from 1997
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