[ICTs-and-Society] Pre-Conference Online Discussion

[Louis Suárez-Potts]

Good points all and my response here does not do them justice…. but
one comment below:

On 21 January 2012 04:37, Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Foucault writes in Security Teritory Population that politics mediates
> between populations and environments. The question then is this: at what
> stage can a population become its own environment, and thus do away with
> the necessity for institutional politics?

Let's reverse things and suppose that rather than wait for the
institution to institute a political movement, that populations
("public", in Warner's usage) make themselves more by accidental or
casual assemblage than anything planned according to institutional
precepts, and it is only *after* the assemblage is in fact *there*
that it gains the imprimatur--appellation--of being. That is, I think
that one thing ArabSpring has demonstrated, as well as the Occupy
incidents, is that action happens even without a clear politics, but
that for it to sustain itself, it really does need to enter into the
economy of identity structured by the forms of power and thus politics
we are all familiar with.

But that doesn't mean that "subversion" (sigh… so 80s) is impossible:
quite the opposite. It's rather happening all the time, everywhere,
and more such events will take place and then, one day, the cultural
and political landscape really will be different, though it will
persist in seeming the same. And ICT is accelerating that, just as--as
Zizek pointed out in his recent LRB article--it's also accelerating
the opposite.

Cheers,
louis
t is