From Richard Seymour’s Patreon yesterday:
Specifically, we need to consider, in the context of relentless social comparison, steepening class inequality, a culture of extolment of winners and sadism toward losers, and of the increasingly toxic psychological consequences of failure, the persecutory and vengeful passions secreted by the social body. Rather than simply blaming disinformation, or scapegoating Russian interference or the ‘Israel lobby’, we need to think about how disinformation campaigns leverage those wayward passions, and turn them into political weapons. We need to consider how the engorged excitement of these rioters, their enthralment at the spectre of catastrophe and annihilation, is in part an alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression borne of a dying civilization.
As he puts it earlier in the essay, “we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion” because it’s not a factual phenomenon. He’s making a subtle point here about the need to recognise social platforms, what he calls the social industry, without centring it. These are not mechanisms of social control, allowing shadowy foreign actors to intervene on a previously harmonious whole (to invoke what I argued here is a now familiar form of liberal populism), but rather generative mechanisms through which passions are stoked and mobilised. With a thin and distributed organisational layer riding them into public assembly.
An observation he made elsewhere that contemporary fascism has given up on the future has stuck with me. This is not the desire for a future purified of discord that was the libidinal mechanism of classical fascism, ultimately an image of what can be if only we remove what shouldn’t be, but rather a drive based response to the affects of contemporary social decay. How do we explain where, as Seymour puts it, “a critical mass of young men ready for the adventure of violence” comes from in the first place?
Mark Carrigan 