Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, April 06, 2009

OMG

Scenes from the Real America.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can someone please explain to me why Hitler-worshipping American fascists always demonize their enemies as Hitler-like fascists?

Dale Carrico said...

Projection: A defense mechanism in which an internal desire/thought/feeling is displaced and located outside the subject, in another subject.

Robin said...

I wish I hadn't just looked at that before bedtime.

The stuff of goddamn nightmares.

Mitchell said...

Dale, an off-topic question. I just ran across the two-year-old essay on "precarity" which is still the top post at the Technoprogressive group blog. It made me wonder what technoprogressive writing looks like when technoprogressivism is in power, as I would say (somewhat hyperbolically) that it is now. Back in 2007, you were writing under a president who governed from the gut, under the administration that proclaimed the global war on terror, in a time when neoliberal austerity was still regarded as a self-evidently good thing (the Fukuyaman end of history still prevailed in economic thought, if no longer in politics). But now - Obama is an intellectual, "war on terror" is verba non grata, we are apparently now all neo-Keynesians rather than neoliberals... You are extremely close to being mainstream thought now, part of the new common sense - and not just you, Dale Carrico, but a large number of progressive thinkers who in the Bush era were supposed to be yesterday's intellectuals. I am very curious about how that is going to affect both the nature of what is written, and its status in the broader universe of communications. One approach would be to become hypercritical (and I think you have already noticed this in some sections of the left, declaring Obama a sellout when not even two months had passed since his inauguration), in order to maintain the critically distanced stance. Another is what I think of as the Kojève option - I read somewhere that he became a sort of E.U. intellectual functionary, being of the opinion that philosophy had done its work. The professoriate could become a sort of super-think-tank for re-progressivized Washington DC, a step back in abstraction from actual policy professionals, but still part of a continuum and a system stretching all the way to the executive branch, rather than existing in opposition and irrelevance as it seemed to do under Bush. A third option would be academic retirement from politics; a de-politicization of thought in the humanities. I don't mean that intellectuals would cease to care about or be engaged with politics, but that there might be less of this sense that intellectuals as a class needed to take certain stands, because the culture as a whole was now essentially on the right track. Political engagement would be more a matter of personal choice than class duty, so to speak.

So what's the question? I guess I am curious to know whether you find any of these scenarios particularly plausible, or whether some other direction is likely to dominate. Also, I'm writing rather intuitively here (talking out of my ass, as Real America might say), about things of which I do not exactly have rigorous and profound knowledge (namely, the political sensibilities of American humanists and their place in the politico-economico-cultural whole), and await the inevitable Zen-master rap-across-the-knuckles that will reveal how some of the basic assumptions constituting the discourse above are in fact wrong. :-)

Anonymous said...

Wow! Great comment and question from Mitchell. :)

Can't wait to read Dale's reply!