Re: <nettime> The imaginary institution of society

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Patrice asks: "Can France be reformed?"

I really don't know. It's amazing how degraded social relations have
become. The job and cost-of-living issues are just grotesque, also in
Albania where people are out on the streets in force. The violence of the
cops gets ever more sadistic. It looks as though this will become a big
European youth movement, I sure hope so. But the rich could care less, and
the leaders serve the rich, who pay for the cops. See a bigshot economist,
Daron Acemoglu:

https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/Automation%20and%20Repression.pdf

Frederic says:

"All these people are diverse and what is wonderful is how a young
generation found a way to come together and socialize, and become
political. This is neither nihilism, not a will to reinvent Tarnac model
everywhere."

You're right and there's absolutely a continuity of dis-identification with
the corporate state that links me to all these folks, including the one who
burn down the town halls. But the trap that turns spontaneous rage into the
spark of planned repression is real. I think that if people would've shot
the cops in Minneapolis, we'd have soldiers on the streets already. That's
why something is more important to my eyes:

"Yes, we need a new imaginary but also symbolic and real institution of
society. Even if the Dems will win (not sure at all actually), there is
something broken that can be fixed only only with a kind of new Social
Contract or something, no?"

That's what Castoriadis was aiming at, me too, not only a revolt but a
revolution. I grabbed his title, Imaginary institution of society, because
it gestures to my sector, cultural production. We've got different groups
coming into Watershed Art & Ecology all the time and I'm totally immersed
in this subversive moment when people are ready to think new thoughts and
express new images and gestures. To me, the institution part implies the
symbolic and the real, but that's exactly what we're not producing. We have
revolts not revolutions. It's the same as ever on the American left, people
want to be anarchists and communists like it was the nineteenth century, or
maybe the thirties - and they're the best, because the rest are just
complacent or scared. Yeah, for sure we need a new Social Contract, how to
imagine that? The alternative does look like a civil war. Widespread
dis-identification with the dominant form of society is a moment of
possibility, but it's fucking dangerous. I think one has to respect the
danger in order to seize the possibility.

Allan says:

"In following the unfolding unrest, what startles me, is that  similar
manifestations have not appeared in the U.S. where the wholesale
dismemberment of the supposedly 'democratic' infrastructure has been taking
place under the current Trump regime. It's not that there hasn't been
outrage and actions but there is also a sense of false hope that the
electoral process will solve the mess Trump and his proxies have created."

I actually take electoral politics seriously. Because I just don't see
other places where anything real is being elaborated. The last two cycles
of street politics - Occupy followed by Black Lives Matter - really did a
lot to pull the wool from people's eyes, and open up their hearts. But
that's a kind of perceptual and affective contract, it's not worked out in
the symbolic and effective dimensions, so it can't be instituted. A new
contract needs a whole-of-society effort, across race, class and caste, and
I continue to think that the people who are failing are the so-called
professional-managerial class, the "virtue hoarders" as Catherine Liu says.
That's my class, even if I betrayed it by never taking a job. It's no time
to hoard. You have to go for broke, former professionals on the way to AI
trash! This looks more and more like the definitive battle, and yet guns
and civil war means we lose. I think people have to produce the new
contract, as a whole (that's almost done) and in detail (that's barely
started).

Are the US, France, Albania and wherever else reformable? Looks like we're
gonna find out.

Take care everyone,

Brian
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