Thread by @deontologistics

There are times I wish we could have something like a 'symbolic amnesty' where we just wipe a particular terminological slate clean of connotations so that we can have certain conversations without constantly blundering into excuses to derail them.

Like, it'd be really nice if we could talk openly about the *incredibly tight* ties between governance and finance in countries like the UK without having to be on the defence about accidental associations with accusations of blood libel. It's a discursive minefield.

There's a perennial 'man covered in shit' problem here, where no matter how economically reasoned or anti-racistly seasoned your critiques are there *will* be people who turn up to agree with you dragging flecks of anti-semitic faeces on their shoes, if nothing else.

I'd really, really like to be able to openly talk about how the post-imperial UK made itself the financial hub of the global tax evasion industry, and how the Tory faction who drove Brexit are now aiming to double down on this role, committing to making the world around us worse.

Like, this is real concrete complicity. The relative purchasing power of my wages depends on how much trust dictators and their associates can put in my country to help them extract and hide wealth from people all across the globe. There's no good symbol for this complicity.

The closest we've got is Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew, which is a world historical convergence of financial-political complicity wrapped up in upper class sex cults. But the sexual angle means it's easily assimilated to historical examples that ignore the present network.

You're stuck talking about billionaires as either sex perverts (Epstein), unfeeling robots (Zuckerberg), puerile meme-lords (Musk). The first has obvious issues. The second is so close to Ickean 'lizard people' that you'll reliably get called out on it. The last has *problems*.

This is one way of tracing the current counter-cultural moment in outline. The symbolic resources that are acceptable within the mainstream culture for articulating the perniciousness of the ruling the class are incredibly restrict(ed/ive). This is an opportunity for divergence.

This divergence isn't necessarily good. The legacy of the 4chan-tumblr wars is far from straightforwardly positive, but you have to look at it for what it is (deontologistics.co/2019/10/24/tfe…). If Musk is doing a better job of engaging with the counter-culture than you are, that's on you.

Insisting that the existing language of 'capitalists' is already sufficient is to ignore the parameters of the task we've supposedly set ourselves, i.e., to give explanatory and normative resources to those agitating for real social change on the basis of their (class) interests.

Of course, there's a good chunk of the youth who are primed for Marxist analysis or other strands of radicalism, but they're about as likely to become Twitter tankies covered in semiotic shit as they are to embrace 'the one true way', whatever that's supposed to be.

They're primed to embrace the very symbolic resources that their elders forbid them in the name of transgressive liberation. Such transgressive desires can be appealed to in constructive ways, we're talking about 'counter' culture here, which is essentially oppositional.

But fragmented opposition based on transgressively reappropriating symbolic taboos from the dominant culture in a more or less random manner is a classic case of tactics over strategy. Symbolic pluralism is useful, but it also needs to be disciplined to facilitate solidarity.

Part of this discipline is recognising that the symbolic amnesties we can sometimes achieve in local contexts, are more or less impossible in the global context, unless cultural hegemony has already been achieved. The only alternative is disciplined experimentation.

The key to experimental discipline is simultaneously suspending one's own impulse to pre-emptively criticise while acknowledging that our success conditions are defined by how well our experimental symbols engage with people will never suspend these impulses.

This is a very concrete case of 'you're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem'. It's entirely up to you whether you'll suspend your critical reflexes in the name of political pluralism and experimental solidarity. Terminological schadenfreude can be poisonous.

At the end of the day, no matter how subtly honed your semiotic/hermeneutic understanding, loudly enjoying others' failures is not the same as trying to succeed. Merely attending to failure is not the same as trying to learn from it, especially when you expected these failures.

There's a genuine political Gettier problem here: just because something you expected to fail did doesn't mean that you know anything, because you have to see whether the way it *actually* failed lined up with how you *expected* it to fail. There's no knowledge without learning.

If there's a singular vice of the Marxist tradition it's the (self-identified) cassandra complex: pointing to every failure of concrete efforts at local reform as evidence for one's prophesy of inevitable global revolution. Hegelian idealism packaged as Feuerbachian materialism.

Obsessing about the failures of socialism in the 20th century is pure navel gazing if you're not really looking around you at the failures of political movements in the present. Simply assuming you already understood the way they would fail turns your knowledge into ignorance.

If the 'negative' in 'negative dialectics' just means sneering at other's failures then it's not worth a damn. I don't give a fuck that you don't give a fuck, because giving a fuck about materialism entails giving a fuck about a whole lot of things that aren't your pet theory.

I cannot locate the original tweet, but someone posted this line a line of utter shitpost poetry recently, and it stuck with me: "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted Marx in various ways; the point is to change him."

This means not just separating what is living from dead in his ideas and those of the tradition that elaborate them, but also what's living from dead in their symbolic repertoire, and being willing to let others with similar goals experiment with it in different ways.

Part of what I've been doing here on twitter over the last few months is carrying out some symbolic experiments. Trying to see what sticks and what doesn't, what resonates, coheres, or has unexpected and unfortunate consequences. I'll keep doing this, and reflecting on it.

I heartily encourage you to explore alternate paths. Just don't be so invested in your symbols that you can't tell the difference between rhetoric and logic, affinity and commitment; and be prepared to switch lanes when we find things that work. Solidarity in symbolism guys. 🖖

CODA: For anyone interested in this ongoing work on symbolism, here are a couple threads:

1. Solidarity in Joy:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1356925172742303744?s=20

2. Promethean Wolf and Orphic Magpie:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1357765000367120385?s=20

3. The Hogwarts Experience:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1359838567321722881?s=20