[iDC] What is Left? / What Does a Distributed Politics Look Like?

[Abe Burmeister]

What is Left?

The left perhaps has never been unified. Perhaps it has always been a  
patchwork of interests: labor unions, marxists, socialists,  
feminists, queers, green activists, anarchists, progressives,  
billionaire followers of Karl Popper, Hong Kong born pyramid  
schemers, a whole slew of post-hippie entrepreneurs, and who knows  
what else all get mushed together under the same banner, although a  
few might deny it themselves. Unity is perhaps a luxury reserved for  
the right, although it of course has it's own divides, particularly  
between those whose politics stem more from a desire to gain and  
retain power and those whose politics are more about a reluctance to  
embrace change.

Last week a study in Nature Neuroscience [ http://www.nature.com/ 
neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn1979.html ] presented a very 21st  
century interpretation of left vs. right. Those on the political left  
apparently are more cognitively open to and aware of change itself.  
The classic conservative vs. liberal divide has been reconstructed as  
a neuro-politics. For those that identify themselves as being on the  
left (and I suspect most of this list does in at least some regard)  
it's a tantalizing study, for it basically says that to be  
conservative is to be stupid. Unfortunately though it is based  
entirely on a study of the letters "M" and "W" being flashed on  
screen in a set up where response time is measured. Hardly enough  
grounds to make large scale conclusions about politics at large, or  
at least one would hope. For one thing the left is far more  
conservative than many of it's members would like to let on.

The right wing (or at least a small intellectual section of it) after  
all has long been struggling to reclaim the word liberal, while large  
sections of the left are increasingly mired in fits of nostalgia. In  
the French Revolutionary era of course the left rapidly moved  
rightward as new more radical members joined the Legislative  
Assembly. Yet today if there is any movement at all it is probably  
best described as a churning. The center left is alternately busy  
dismantling the gains of the 20th century or busy frantically trying  
to hold on to and defend what remains. The most active and charged  
leftist movement of today is the green movement, which has the  
scientific community behind it, and increasingly the media and in  
some spaces popular politics behind it as well. Yet at its roots  
environmentalism (or at least large strains of it) is about  
conservation, that is to say conservatism by another name.

It's not just in environmentalism where the left flirts with  
conservatism. It's perhaps most visibly apparent in architecture at  
least in America, the more liberal the town or neighborhood, the more  
regressive the housing stock. Meanwhile it is conservatives who are  
more likely to embrace genetically modified food, nuclear power and  
the latest march to war. The liberal / conservative divide as laid  
out in by neuroscience is all about change yet it breaks down when  
applied across the actual politics of people. There are other vectors  
for explaining and dividing politics of course, power being the most  
glaring of them. But when you start combining it all, power, money,  
change, faith, race, land, freedom and whatever else people bring to  
the table, the political landscape that emerges does not divide on  
left versus right axis at all, nor on straight top to bottom  
hierarchy either but instead fragments in many dimensions, and into  
the multifold complexities that make up real politics the world over.  
What is left then is of course... very complicated.

This is being posted to the "Institute for Distributed Creativity"  
and the real question being asked is: What does a distributed  
politics look like? For we are just beginning to create a tool set to  
really look at and understand the distributed networks that  
interweave the globe. From power laws to protocols, through tracings  
and generations, and as it goes almost without saying by utilizing  
the unprecedented ability to transmit information across the globe, a  
whole new way of looking at politics is now at least theoretically  
possible. There are antecedents of course, Bruno Latour and company's  
Actor Network Theory (ANT) in particular comes to mind. But while ANT  
and its variations has resulted in some rather interesting and  
detailed tracings/portraits of complex networks, it has done little  
to incorporated the actual advances in network theory itself. By  
understanding these dynamics and ever evolving interconnections is it  
possible to move beyond the politics of left and right, the politics  
of have and have not and towards an understanding of distributed  
politics?


- Abe Burmeister
New York City, September 2007


ps. Big thanks to Trebor for inviting me to moderate this list, as I  
non-academic I suspect it will be quite an intriguing and hopefully  
exciting experience...



Abe Burmeister | abe at abstractdynamics.org | +1 917.806.8177
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Abstract Dynamics | www.abstractdynamics.org
Abe Burmeister Design | www.abeburmeister.com