|
loquitor--i am not sure that your point in the first post above really does apply to the collective that assange is a spokesmodel for, nor do i think that the claim about being-elected and being-accountable applies to most of the functionaries whose opinions and actions were outed in these leaks.
maybe the question is other than we've been talking about. maybe the differend (the place of talking past each other) lay with where each of us thinks actual power lay in an administrative apparatus, whether with the elected people who signal policy shifts or with the permanent functionaries who operate in the everyday context(s)....and whether it lay with the administrative apparatus itself or with the networks that the administrative apparatus is in the midst of...so what power is, really. i don't think the united states operates with the personified power that tv presents. i think almost everything about the electoral process is an illusion, not so much because of its mechanics, but rather because in i think we live in an oligarchy that's very much a class and patronage network affair, in exactly the way any other "third world" oligarchy works. and i think that the first step toward making anything approaching coherent statements about the world we live in is the recognition of what that world is. and i dont think that the people at wikileaks "Know" what's up and are trying to "teach us" fuck all---i think they're merely relaying the information and that it's up to us, out here in the world, to try to figure out what it means. the coalition of transnational media that they've assembled is non-trivial in this regard---i think that these folk are interested in speeding the end of nation-states. but i also think that anyone who seriously looks into the history of the disaster that's been the 20th century nation-state would also hope for it's demise. think about turkey just after world war one as a good example of what this nitwit notion of nation-state leads to--think about what it meant for the greek population that had lived there for something like 2000 years that all of a sudden found themselves ethnically undesirable because it advanced the reactionary cause of "nation"----we're still playing out the same stupid drama. nations are stupid and the faster that notion is imploded the better.
and i don't have a particular alternative. i think that's something to be fashioned. but it can't be fashioned until the problems of nation and nation-states are addressed. and that won't happen until people see what they are. and that won't happen without information. and i don't think the wikileaks business is enough: it's just a start....
but this is macro stuff. the micro stuff is above. it's time for a beverage.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|