[ICTs-and-Society] statement of alternative informatics about gezi park and social media

[Andrew Feenberg]

I can't understand your response to my simple comment. You complicate things! As for the "not support for looting, etc." I can make no sense of your syntax. Do you think the student movement did not support the workers and should have been in favor of looting, or against looting? The students supported the workers and suppressed looting. The radio network in Luxemburg played a major role and it was owned by somebody, not the movement. Don't discount the message because the medium is owned by a private group. Leaflets and newspapers from the movement were fundamental means of communication. You can examine them at 

http://edocs.lib.sfu.ca/projects/mai68/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matze Schmidt" <matze.schmidt at n0name.de>
To: "Seda Guerses" <sguerses at esat.kuleuven.be>
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net, "Andrew Feenberg" <feenberg at sfu.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 2:59:05 AM
Subject: Re[2]: [ICTs-and-Society] statement of alternative informatics about gezi park and social media

Hello,

> illusions of the revolutionaries about the media are also exaggerated.
> The fact is the Internet replaces the roneotype or mimeograph machine

Mh, that's the media-point of view very often paradoxically powered by
an at-first-hand-believe (copy your thoughts directly, mediated
immediacy).
The networks, and we are talking about--the so called public network
named WWW--turn out to be over-monitored by every national securities
now. Copying-machines in 68 where _just_ the linguistic layer under the
radar of the state or more simple: they were at hand. May be
wall writings were more important? The political layer though was the
strategic mistake of not having support by workers for lootings and the
taking over of the production itself: The economical layer (aka basis,
Marx etc.). A notion of production of information (PoI) can be helpful
at this point, that's why the question of media is crucial as they work
for an country-related outer (coverage) and inner public 'realm'
(opinion).

> http://kafila.org/2013/07/05/the-unbearable-lightness-of-drowning-in-your-own-myth-tamer-soyler/#more-19165

A concept of media understood _as_ machinery is interlinking the PoI
with the political issues. "Becoming the media" only on the semantic
level without controlling them structurally is illusionary, controling
them without a content as well. And as the contents in Turkey seem to be
Erdogan-centric--the article by Tamer Soyler approves this for the
academics--and 'decentered' in the political parts at them same time
people are looking for particular solutions.

Of course the prime minister was not the "key political figure" the last
ten years, this is the imago only. It was a complex of a bourgeois
project getting "hot money" into the country, pushing the markets (in a
simple and dissatisfying summary). Especially the academical world is
overchallenged by this. Tamer Soyler writes quite clearly in the
position of the middle-class he is intending to analyse. He is writing
about "anger" and the "AKP government" had "done a great job and
successfully transformed Istanbul’s infrastructure" and reproduces the
narratives he wants to deconstruct with one strong kernel: Democratic
institutions control economical developments--quote:

"Without the election threshold, different segments of the opposition
can get into the parliament and the government can be confronted
strongly."

Economics is seen as a question of participation, Soyler doesn't leave
this narrow field.

> work with bad design/non-consumable imagery/symbolicism

I am not sure about this reproval projecting a "bad
design/non-consumable imagery/symbolicism". I guess it's not about the
design or the sexyness of it, it is about the body or substance (Hegel?)
and context of those pictures, their statements and etymology.
The young lady in red is exactly the erotic figure echoing the civic
imaging of how a revolution _by default and by accident_ looks like and
how it learns to be one--remember Heinrich Heine once claimed Eugene
Delacroix' painting as the one that captures the 1830 revolution best--a
heroic 'style', the style of a stage in front of an aimless audience who
where once performers looking at performers, the street only.
(Interesting enough is that with such interptretations the structuralist
anti-substantial attitude ends and différance "depending on the
story-teller", see Soyler, becomes trivial.)
I don't agree with for instance German writer Roger Behrens, who
recently repeated the factory would be the place of class struggle but
the street the place of change. If one follows theories of a fabrication
of the social (life) public spaces are as well the place of class
struggle and the decision of the change is made in the array of
production.

> to
> create their own language. if it is the latter, i suspect it is going
> to take some time before we recognize that new language.

And I personally don't believe in the "own language" and would argue
language must be established, but--let's say with Barthes (a language I
know but do not have)--the representational position of that possible
language that define the contents of it, not "les mots" (Satre) itself,
will be important. So the connection of the disintegrated
signifier-significate relationship must be revitalised and a Toma can
refer to many things but a unconscious proletarian may only refer to
some trees as symbol for an ever totalitarian history and a future of a
divided social, despite of:

> new alliance[s] between
> the mainstream masses who are politicized for the first time in years,
> and those whose political voices have been oppressed for longer
> periods.

Since connections as connections are nothing without any idea of their
quality and sort which may more than a sort of struggling against a
generalized "existing global order" (quoting you).

> the existing global order

Best,

Matze Schmidt



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