<nettime> Daimonion: Winning US Midterms, Your Leaf Node of the GDS, and Foucault-Habermas Debate Results

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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These midterms matter.  Real checks and balances hang in the balance.  Take heed.

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How to win?  Foucault said elections don't matter, free speech doesn't, etc., because they are "fake" not "real."  Habermas warned in response that talk like that will undermine everything you depend on but take for granted.  This dire prediction has come true.

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A hundred years ago today, Weimar Germany was trying mightily to stop real fascism which claimed to just be, at the time, efficient action of mechanized government i.e. the modern answer to stale dusty Enlightenment baloney like constitutions, checks and balances, and rights.  They failed.

When the US left and center, progressives and moderates, united in the sixties they won big (civil rights).  In the thirties they did too (the labor movement).  This can work again, but will require similar big-tent strategy and tactics.  

It isn't rocket science, and is largely gut-level, a common sense of give and take.  Habermas' idea that progress is both real and incomplete should suffice, with a little help.

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Norbert Wiener, who virtually invented the field of cybernetics, wrote that humans and humanity learn by two main methods, experience and genetics, and in the current phase of history predominantly through the former.  Francisco Varela agreed, and put experience at the center of his systems theory (both inner and outer).  Experience was focal for the Bauhaus, and much of the best thought of the Frankfurt School, as well as Pragmatism in the US and Dewey who informed generations of progressives.  

Experience could well be a unifying theme and message for this fall's opposition to technocratic authoritarianism, encompassing the sciences and the arts, with secular ties not exclusive of diverse spiritual perspectives (like the sixties).  These freedoms after all have deep and strong roots in European and US ideals despite their recurrent denigration by opportunistic regimes and what Hamilton called "POWERFUL INDIVIDUALS" (all caps his).  

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Reaching back even earlier in Europe's history we see that Chaucer, after visiting Italy in the 1380's, brought back the word "experience" and spent most of his remaining years contrasting it to might makes right: "experience and auctoritee."  Reason, or rationality, he understood could be rendered servile to the coercive power if it was not granted rights and guided by conscience, agency, and continual learning.  The Frankfurt School said much the same thing when they critiqued "instrumental rationality" and its "introversion of the sacrifice."  Reason is like algorithm.  Martin Jay, an expert on the Frankfurt School, wrote a great book "Songs of Experience" (2005) which tracks this distinction across diverse cultural time and place.  His "Magical Nominalism" (2025) adds to the picture.  

Experience, and the lack of it, are at the core of the AI-GPT and internet phenomena, as well as the gravitational center of the US move to technocratic authoritarianism.  

The principle cannot be ignored, and might if considered afresh help unite the center and left once again to bring a real victory over the catastrophic far right this fall.

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Amid the onslaught of this summer's environmental supercalamities, I was considering the idea of the biosphere having a "vegetative soul" as the old nomenclature put it, that is, a life-principle of organic mortality which our human technology has power to extinguish if we do not accept responsible stewardship.  Macfarlane's "Is a River Alive" has had me contemplating this lately, and along with Nievergelt's book on allegory as epistemology (which reminded me of Chaucer) prompted me to glance at my copy of Weston's "Ritual to Romance."  This latter book, on prehistoric fertility or vegetation myth, had provided the anthropological basis for Eliot's "Waste Land" (another premonition of environmental, cultural, and social collapse from circa one century ago).  

Weston mentions Attis, who I had to look up, the child of Cybele who Wikipedia calls a "daimon."  I had to look that up too.  It means, kind of, "intermediary" between humanity and the gods, a messenger-being, not really good or bad in itself.  The Wikipedia pages for "Daimon" and "Daimonic" have good info.  One line defines daimon as "the experience of a deity," what we might call the instantiated means of interaction, exchange, and transit going both ways.  

In the alternative spelling "daemon," as in Maxwell's molecular-gate analogy which was taken up by computer science to denote "background system processes," we find a cyber-space or network-time correlate.  These "background intermediaries" can be benevolent, or "eudaimonic," if salubrious "agathodaimons," but they can also be bad and highly toxic if hijacked and steered to nefarious ends like the current crop of techbroligarchs have done with help from sleazy demagogues and a conservative party in collapse.  We have had what Hamilton calls "an unequivocal experience" of this, i.e. evidence beyond reasonable doubt.  Peter the Heel calls his agenda "a machine controlled by one man" which supposedly will save freedom from democracy since the two are, in his view, "incompatible."  You call that guarding the henhouse?  

Even Foucault wrote, perhaps a little confessionally, late in life that his books are not texts but "experiences."  

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Socrates was both an innovative thinker and a critic of the government of his day.  He attributed much of his life's working process to a "daimonion" or internal voice that would warn him -- a quick "no" -- before making a mistake.  This quirk is much discussed and debated, but we can all pretty much relate to it.  Bartleby the Scrivener seems to have had one, which uttered for him "I prefer not to" with regard to his job as a copyist on Wall Street.   Goethe and Yeats both wrote about them. 

It could well be that if ordinary people, the culture at large, or so to say "public opinion" in all the major countries of this world ask for something better than the technocratic race to bottom being offered by oligarchs, enough politicians will see the option of something better to make a difference in the course of real events and not just in theory.  Everyone using their voice a little, as has been discussed, could be the leaf node debug process we need for the Global System to regain better balance or even leverage the current state of breakdown to make a genuinely fresh beginning.

I have several works and media projects in flight regarding this line of possibility of which I'd be happy to share further details on request.  They cover peace between the US and China, interfaith dialogue, and environmental protection, among other things.  


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