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This is neither here nor there...


As part of an ongoing quest for the real Real, here's another psycho-political meditation that touches on how eRep mirrors real life mirrors eRep, mediated through the lens of half-stolen poetics (big tip o' the hat to Saul Newman from Adbusters), blended up into a cut-and-paste pastiche of e-polemics, and set out to dry by a few days of vacation.



tl;dr version: Don't be a spineless sap.





Political Mathematics

Thesis: The e/state is clown show desperately trying to maintain its dignity within a crumbling symbolic order.
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Securitization, with its double-meaning intact, is the dominant mathematical paradigm of the e/state. It is a 3D matrix that aligns deployment of strategies and technologies of control, surveillance and preemption, and for a permanent war mobilization, with the packaging-up of realized play "value" like the-joy-of-clicking, "earning" and "communicating" into unrealized play "markets" like "national pride", "the value of e-USD" and arbitraged "profits". (And in the real life equivalent of these, likewise.)

The virutal matrix and the real one are intertwined. The third dimension within the 2D world-matrix of securitization is simply a line of credit back into the 3D world which pays out in Bucharest. In the 3D world, the third dimension is the line of omnipresent bullshit, represented culturally by, say, the Murdoch news empire, and described in more or less scientific terms by Talib as the irrational belief in market probabilities.



The Securitate was no laughing matter, yet they were clowns.


The continual blurrring of ersatz dissidence and protest and polemic into the idea of a threat to state security -- climate change activists arrested under antiterrorist powers in the 3D world, every other person being labeled a "PTOer" in the 2D world -- suggest that over there the so-called war on terrorism has as its real target all those who dissent from the state-capitalist order, and that over here the e/state has as its target re-attaching all those who have ever experienced a frison of self-realization when the hum-drum "fun" of virtual attachments got too sticky for comfort.

The double-mirrored logic of securitization is, in both realms, clearly a reaction to a crisis in the symbolic order of the nation-state under conditions of capitalist globalization. The nation-state as a container for sovereignty "algorithms" has become suspect. (Quotation marks are, obviously, not necessary on this point here in the 2D world, but I add them for satsifactory 3D resonance.)

Here is a tricky analogy. We know that mathematics is, at the end of the day, necessarily finitary. Despite its beauty and magic, it bumps into impossibilities when it tries to encompass the infinite. And in much the same sense. The e/state cannot contain all things. It is becoming increasingly clear that the identity and purpose of the e/state are less clear than many of us were led to believe.



Add Kurdistan to e-Republik naow! (jk!)


Security, writ large in that epic-historical neo-Clauswitzian way so dear to the certainties suffered by big-nation chauvinists, as well as securities, equally dear to the poker-obsessed pick-pocketbooks of financial fantasists, become the key mimetic devices for sovereignty to re-articulate itself in this fluid, changing, terminally post-Clauswitzian global order.

And so e/state power spills out beyond its borders, constructing ever-expanding networks and games of surveillance, incarceration, control and war-making that are no longer determined by national boundaries and are constantly testing the waters to find the words to buttress up the crumbling symbolic order. Prisons are "camps". Wars are "police operations". Surveillance is "information sharing". Financial meltdown is a "game".


Zombie Leader horrified to hear news of Resistance to the Zombie Apocalypse

We are in a zone of indistinction. National sovereignty blurs into global security while at the same time desperately reifying and fetishizing existing borders and erecting new ones everywhere. And in this sense, the distinction between real world and New World is indistinguishable.



Contestation

Thesis: A specter is haunting the e/worl😛 Democracy 2.0
Soon it will arrive and many systems will have to be re-booted.
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There are important sites for contestation against the crumbling symbolic order.

The logic of security, so ubiquitious and omnipresent, is a mechanism of depoliticization. It seeks to impose an order on social reality that is self-legitimizing and beyond question. It is an ideology that authorizes the infinite accumulation of e/state power.

This colonization of the discourse on social norms has reached the point where the idea of security has become coextensive with the idea of freedom. We have come to think of freedom as strictly circumscribed by security: a binary unit.

The liberal idea of an appropriate balance between freedom and security is understood to be an illusion. The perverse logic of the double bind of securitization is an empy landscape. All hope of emancipation has faded. Our task is reduced to an obsessive exercise in measuring risks posed by an ever-present specter of catastrophe.

The micro-politics of fear are intensified, producing a generalized neurosis.


Coming soon: Garbage-Dump World!

The first site of contestation must be against this e/state fantasy of security and the affect of fear and despair that it produces. The hope of emancipation must be reasserted. The risk of politics must be reaffirmed.

It is not enough to claw back lost liberties. A new language of freedom is needed that is no longer conditioned by security.



Freedom must be rediscovered.

This is achieved through the practice of political contestation, through resistance to "norms", through modes of collective indiscipline and disobedience, and by the surveillance of surveillance.

This resistance challenges both neoliberal capitalism and its symbolic claim on the "democratic" state to speak for its e/citizens. It is not post- or anti-democratic; it simply finds the modes on offer inadequate for its needs and seeks to open up a political space for alternative and more democratic modes of democracy.

New forms of autonomous politics may even deserve the use of a different term, like "anarchism", which is increasingly returning to the forefront of the political imagination as formal representative institutions become obviously empty vessels without life.


Darling, are you ready for a whole new stage of love and rage?

Leaderless movements of the enraged. Public spaces created by those disgusted not only with the status quo, but also with the clown show that surrounds its crumbling edifice.

Freedom beyond security. Democracy beyond the state. Politics beyond the party. Economic organization beyond capitalism (and it's evil twin sister, state-capitalist "socialism"). Globalization beyond borders. Life beyond biopolitics.

e/Life beyond e/Republikanism?