'Bodies in space' - comments on social media and political mobilisation

There's a very thought-provoking interview with Mark Fisher over at New Left Project, which covers a range of issues. This is an extract which I think is worth re-posting, though I obviously recommend reading the whole article. Fisher is asked:

Turning to technology then, you describe social media in Capitalist Realism as being ‘profoundly illiterate’, replacing genuine engagement with what you call ‘slogan recognition’—but yet they have also played some part in the recent mobilisations around the world. How do you assess the advantages and disadvantages of social media?

This is his response:

‘Profoundly illiterate’ comes from Deleuze and Guattari, who talk about capitalism in general not really being a literate culture. And you see that tendency to what I call post-literacy intensified. I think with social media in general it is a classic case of dialectical ambivalence. We’ve seen the respect in which they can mobilise people, although it may well have been overplayed. At the same time it is foolish to deny that it played some significant role in those events. And it was also part of everything that happened at the end of 2010 with the student movement in the UK—social media played a role in that.

At the same time because of the matrix it is plugged into, we don’t know what social media would be like if it wasn’t plugged into late capitalism. That’s why it’s difficult to judge it in itself. Certainly at the moment a large proportion of social media is reproducing capitalist subjectivity for sure, reproducing and intensifying it. But we don’t know if that’s a property of the media themselves or an effect of its current situation.

Nonetheless, one of the things I think is particularly notable is, and I think it relates to this question of cultural stagnancy, is attentional erosion. It’s partly why something like Twitter, I think, it does substantially erode one’s capacity to concentrate on anything. I’ve tried to spend a lot less time on Twitter lately and I think the danger of Twitter, as opposed to Facebook, is tied up with how useful it can be. I tried to spend a lot less time on Twitter before and then ‘Hackgate’ happened and the riots happened, and there it sort of came into its own as a form of counter media. Mainstream media is increasingly intolerable and the only way to work with it is by a counter media network provided by things like Twitter, it makes it more bearable.

But at the same time having our consciousness permanently segmented in that way makes it very difficult to concentrate on anything. I don’t want to get into saying that ‘in the good old days of face-to-face interactions’ and all that. I don’t think that’s a useful comparison. The really important contrast is the one between forms of attention giving.

One’s capacity to do things like read a book is rapidly deteriotated by something like Twitter. Also in terms of things like writing – in the past when you found a difficulty or an impasse in writing you sort of had to get through that by sticking with it. It’s now so easy to avoid that struggle to get over an impasse because of the distractions that are immediately available.

And I think that goes for everybody in culture, captured in a phrase from Linda Stone (some Microsoft Executive turned therapist guru)—‘continuous partial attention’. I think this is the kind of thing that social media is producing in all of us—which is, in a way, quite a nightmarish situation: A world in which no one is really paying attention to anything.

And the point as to why I think this is different to ‘the good old days of face-to-face interaction’ is that this form of digital twitch distracts from everything including itself. It’s not as if you fully pay attention to your Twitter feed. It is, by its very nature, kind of fragmentary and it produces this panic sense of belatedness. You always feel as if you are behind, which in a sense you are by the nature of the medium. It would be good to drop into this tickertape immediacy now and again, but it’s not the nature of Twitter that you can drop into it. It’s permanently diverting a large portion of your attention and that means your capacity for other kinds of attentional focus is eroded.

Sherry Turkle’s book, that came out last year, Alone Together, gives a really powerful account of the phenomenology of social media and its effect on particularly young people. What she discusses is the intricate etiquette that’s involved with the social media particularly amongst the young, an etiquette worthy of Jane Austen, where teenagers will spend an hour on a one word text to convey the right level of nonchalance. That phrase, ‘alone together’, captures a lot of the subjective quality of what it is to be plugged into cyberspace. There is this form of degraded collectivity which goes along side this feeling of solitude which never goes away.

I think what is significant about the role of social media in things like the Arab spring and the student militancy was that it broke out of its own conditions. One of the problems of the social media, going back to the blogs and discussion boards, is the interminable debate quality. As if there is an infinite time to debate things rather than to get involved and do them. And what is quite clear was that the tendency to endless debate was broken by mobilisation.

But the mobilisations went against the tendencies of social media because it was about the revival of an older style of politics, visions of bodies concentrated in space as opposed to bodies distributed in space that is the normal tendency of cyberspace. I think this then poses another problem which is the way in which communicative technology has colonised our sense of the modern, since our only vision of what is modern is tied up with communicative technology and that any kind of resistance to it or any kind of alternative to it almost seems like a reactionary throwback in a way.

And the issue for me is 1) how do we break out of this capturing of the present and possibility in the future by the communicational and 2) how do we articulate the kind of politics that is technological and really doesn’t depend upon this older model necessarily of bodies being together in space. That seems a real problem actually.

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Less tweeting, more talking (or blogging)

"Don't talk to her - she's a colonial feminist"

If something can't be said in 140 characters or less, why bother trying to say it in 140 characters or less?

I was reminded of this elementary point today by two faintly depressing spats on my Twitter timeline. Both of them illustrate the limits of Twitter, which I recognise is handy for many things - and I'm hardly Twitter-shy myself - but inadequate for developing an even remotely coherent argument.

The first spat concerned the Home Secretary Theresa May's ban on all marches across large swathes of London, an opportunistic response to the planned EDL and anti-racist marches in Tower Hamlets on 3 September. Some tweets are at the playground level, barely more sophisticated than 'Billy Bragg is a smelly poo' or 'The SWP are fatty stupidheads'.

But even the more intelligent interventions in the debates about the banning of racist marches and how to respond to the EDL are weak. This is no surprise - you can't articulate a reasoned critique in a tweet.

The other dispute is between two fine Egyptian revolutionaries Gigi Ibrahim and Hossam el-Hamalawy in the red corner and US-based commentator Mona Eltahawy in the blue corner (or blue and white corner, if slurs about her being a 'Zionist' are to be believed). Hossam called her a 'colonial feminist', which is like calling someone 'fatty stupidhead' after reading some Edward Said. It is name-calling as substitute for political argument. The marxist wing of the greatest revolution of our times can do much better than this.

What's even worse is that Twitter means lots of other people get drawn in too, even if just at the level of reading such silliness. The adversaries retweet supportive comments - or, more likely, tweets which disparage the other side. Polarisation rapidly shuts down any space for thoughtful debate; personality clashes obscure political issues.

My grandad used to say when I was a bairn, "if you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". Or, to be more precise, if you want to say something not very nice then take the time to explain, substantiate and critique. And without the personalised mud-slinging. (That's not strictly what my grandad said - let's call it paraphrasing).

It's a reminder of why those who claim Twitter's 'microblogging' has made blogging redundant are missing the point. A blog post (and the same goes for a comments thread) is a chance to - in a phrase I associate with the late Chris Harman - think things through. Subtlety and balance, not to mention scope for offering evidence to support your assertions, are possible.

Talking is even better. There's no substitute for face-to-face meetings as a way of conducting political discussion. It is possible to pose questions, interpet tone and refine ideas. And if anyone denounces someone as a 'colonial feminist', the immediate laughter of derision operates as an instant reality check.  

It occasionally crosses my mind that Trotsky would have made an amazing blogger. On Twitter, I fear, it would have been different - and, with that level of distraction, there's no way he'd have finished 'A History of the Russian Revolution'! 
 

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'Thatcher, burn in hell' says Sunderland Council deputy leader

One of the top North East stories today is the revelation that Florence Anderson, deputy leader of Sunderland City Council, has made somewhat controversial remarks about our former PM. It's not every day a local paper has the headline: Thatcher, 'Burn in Hell'.

The comment was made on Facebook - or 'social networking website Facebook' as the Sunderland Echo puts it - and the councillor is pleasingly unrepentant about the remark. The former Eppleton Area Miners' Wives Support Group activist says:

“I’m a miner’s widow. I remember 84/85 as if it was yesterday. I hate Thatcher for what she did to my community, what she did to ordinary people here. I stand by what I said.”

The Sunderland Echo is no left-wing paper and attempts to smear Anderson by referring to her as a "Newcastle Utd supporter", just two days ahead of the Tyne and Wear football derby. Considering 'Tory' and 'Newcastle fan' are insults carrying equal weight in Sunderland, this may trigger a contradictory response for many of the paper's readers. 

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Facebook, cuts and the battle of ideas

UPDATE: Join the Facebook group Vote on what cuts we want? No thanks, we don't want ANY cuts   The Guardian reports:  'The government has struck a deal with Facebook to field ideas from the public on further state spending cuts. Facebook's "spending challenge channel" is an expansion of the social networking site's "Democracy UK" pages, set up during the run-up to the general election, and will be used to take suggestions from the public for saving money ahead of the spending review.'

There are a number of things going on here. The first is the attempt to convince us 'we're all in it together'. This is one of the ideological myths that are being deployed to justify the cuts, and weaken resistance to them.

We're supposed to buy into the old notion of 'national unity', everyone united in a common endeavour to reduce the deficit we all apparently share responsibility for. This obscures both the causes of the crisis which is the backdrop to austerity measures - we certainly weren't all responsible for that - and the hugely uneven effects of the public sector cuts, pay freeze, VAT rise etc.

In fact we are seeing a systematic effort to make working class people pay for a crisis generated by the financial sector and wider failures of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than pursuing uncollected taxes from the rich, or curtailing the spiralling wealth of Britain's super-rich, the government is introducing regressive changes that fall most heavily on the poorest.

We can fully expect this to lead to a widening of inequality, in an already appallingly unequal society. This graph illustrates the impact of George Osborne's recent emergency budget, showing variations in how much the measures will cut household incomes for different sectors of society (with the poorest 10% on the left, the richest 10% on the right)

The Facebook 'consultation', like so many other PR moves by the government, is also designed to frame the issues in a way that excludes any suggestion of an alternative to deep cuts. The debate is not, in these terms, about whether or not there should be public sector cuts. It isn't even about how deep the cuts go, or their timing. It's merely about exactly where the knife is targeted.

This is vital in establishing an ideological orthodoxy. When even the IMF - known for being ruthlessly neoliberal - sharply questions the wisdom of cuts (on the grounds that austerity will reduce prospects for a recovery), this narrow framing requires a concerted effort. A key challenge for the left is to undermine this illusion of consensus and clearly outline the alternatives.

Furthermore, any emerging campaign or coalition of those opposed to the government will need to raise political slogans that challenge the current priorities and re-frame the debate.

For example, Stop the War's call to cut war spending and scrap Trident directs attention to the possiblity of doing things differently. It also taps into the very different values many millions of people hold, and connects economic needs with broader political issues.

The phoney 'consultation' approach, finally, is designed to engender an illusion of democracy, inclusiveness and participation. The decisions are already taken, or will be taken behind closed doors by the political and financial elite, but we're supposed to be grateful for these exercises in political 'participation'.

Using Facebook adds an extra cool, modern veneer: this is popular democracy in the connected digital age. Except it is a purely cynical exercise which gives people no actual power, while propping up the dominant myth of an unarguable case for cuts.

It's time to raise our game in response. This means the left advocating political alternatives to the status quo and connecting these ideas with the widespread desire to stop the attacks on welfare and public services. I don't buy the idea, sometimes encountered on the left, that the cuts will 'hit' people later and there's not much we can do for now.

Millions of people know how serious the situation is. We need to start connecting and organising those who reject the ConDem coalition's policies. There is nothing inevitable about this happening - it requires initiative and a willingness to act.

Whatever action the trade unions take - and hopefully there will be mass public sector strikes - we can develop a broad political campaign now, to counter the dominant myths and lay the ground for serious mobilisations.    

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