Papers by Daniel de Zeeuw
New Formations, 2023
In the wake of Trump and Brexit, the late 2010s gave rise to an ambient sense of a post-truth cr... more In the wake of Trump and Brexit, the late 2010s gave rise to an ambient sense of a post-truth crisis. It signals the social media fuelled breakdown of liberal democracy and its ‘fourth estate’ into fragmented and mutually antagonising epistemic media bubbles. Yet at the same time, the new online political movements driving this crisis became enthralled with the radical sense of waking up from a false reality to absolute Truth, ranging from new (con)spiritual fascinations with mystical clarity to far-right ideas about a Great Awakening and red-pilling. This article tries to make sense of this strange resurgence of ‘awakening’ and the experience of radical epistemic clarity from within post-truth culture. We argue that what we refer to as the New Clarity represents the bleeding edge of our current post-truth predicament, which at once intensifies ‘postmodern’ sentiments of cynicism, irony and play and breaks with them in the form of new political-epistemic radicalisms. To draw out this paradoxical relationship between post-truth and the New Clarity, we survey three historical dimensions of postmodernism as theorised by Lyotard and others at the closing of the 20th century, namely: cynicism and the crisis of critique, new spiritualities and authoritarian conspiracism, and the spiralling dialectic between neoliberalism and populism. Breaking down these dimensions to understand the New Clarity, we take the QAnon conspiracy movement as embodying its paradoxical logic. Doing so we offer a critical heuristic for charting the rise of new conspiratorial and spiritual Awakenings today.
Aksioma PostScriptUM #30, series edited by Janez Janša
Is the idea of society as the totality of... more Aksioma PostScriptUM #30, series edited by Janez Janša
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).
On the occasion of Karl Marx's 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and... more On the occasion of Karl Marx's 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and special issues have celebrated his work by focusing on its main achievements – a radical critique of capitalist society and an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the social, economic and political tendencies and struggles of our age. Albeit often illuminating, this has also produced a certain amount of déjà vu. Providing an occasion to disrupt patterns of repetition and musealization, Krisis (http://krisis.eu/) proposes a different way to pay tribute to Marx's revolutionary theorizing. We have invited authors from around the globe to craft short entries for an alternative ABC under the title " Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z " – taking up, and giving a twist to, Kevin Anderson's influential Marx at the Margins (2010). The chief motivation of this collaborative endeavour is to probe the power – including the generative failures – of Marx's thinking by starting from marginal concepts in his work or from social realities or theoretical challenges often considered to be marginal from a Marxist perspective. Rather than reproduce historically and theoretically inadequate differentiations between an ascribed or prescribed cultural , economic, geographic, intellectual, political, social, or spatial centre and its margins, the margins we have identified and inspected are epistemic vantage points that open up new theoretical and political vistas while keeping Marx's thought from becoming either an all-purpose intellectual token employed with little risk from left or right, or a set of formulaic certitudes that force-feed dead dogma to ever-shrinking political circles. We have welcomed short and succinct contributions that discuss how a wide variety of concepts – from acid communism and big data via extractivism and the Haitian Revolution to whiteness and the Zapatistas – can offer an unexpected key to the significance of Marx's thought today. The resulting ABC, far from a comprehensive compendium, is an open-ended and genuinely collective project that resonates between and amplifies through different voices speaking from different perspectives in different styles; we envisage it as a beginning rather than as an end. In this spirit, we invite readers to submit new entries to Krisis, where they will be subject to our usual editorial review process and added on a regular basis, thus making this issue of Krisis its first truly interactive one. The project is also an attempt to redeem, in part, the task that the name of this journal has set for its multiple generations of editors from the very beginning: a crisis/Krise/Krisis is always a moment in which certainties are suspended, things are at stake, and times are experienced as critical. A crisis, to which critique is internally linked, compels a critique that cannot consist simply of ready-made solutions pulled out of the lectern, but demand, in the words of Marx's " credo of our journal " in his letter to Ruge, " the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age " .
Krisis, journal for contemporary philosophy, 2015 issue 1.
Presentation given at the Lisbon conference "From Multitude to Crowds in Social Movements", 27-01... more Presentation given at the Lisbon conference "From Multitude to Crowds in Social Movements", 27-01-2015.
Review of Christian Borch's The Politics of Crowds: an alternative history of sociology (2012) an... more Review of Christian Borch's The Politics of Crowds: an alternative history of sociology (2012) and Stefan Jonsson's A Brief History of the Masses: three revolutions (2008).
In: Krisis 2014-II http://krisis.eu/content/2014-2/krisis-2014-2-07-deZeeuw.pdf
Engaged Withdrawal: Occupying Politics Beyond Politics, Mar 1, 2014
The first part of this essay reviews several contributions to the growing Occupy literature that ... more The first part of this essay reviews several contributions to the growing Occupy literature that proceed from the experiences of and participations in the events as they unfolded. The second part abstracts from these approaches in order to situate Occupy philosophically in current debates on political ontology: between the autonomist-marxist model for radical politics that proposes the cumulative exit from existing political and economic institutions (interpreting Occupy accordingly) and the post-foundationalist critique of this model, on the basis of an alternative vision that defends radical-democratic engagement with existing institutions. De Zeeuw argues that Occupy does not quite 'fit' either model but contains elements of both withdrawal-from and engagement-with: the engaged performance of withdrawal.
Published in La Maleta de Portbou, February 2015.
.pdf is in English
Articles by Daniel de Zeeuw
PostScriptUM #30
Series edited by Janez Janša
Language: English
https://aksioma.org/Daniel-de-Zee... more PostScriptUM #30
Series edited by Janez Janša
Language: English
https://aksioma.org/Daniel-de-Zeeuw-Notes-from-the
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).
Being unidentifiable and untraceable to state or corporate apparatuses of surveillance and contro... more Being unidentifiable and untraceable to state or corporate apparatuses of surveillance and control today has become almost synonymous with being anonymous. It is in this capacity that anonymity is often understood as instrumental and conducive to citizens' personal privacy vis-à-vis said apparatuses. Yet there is another sense to anonymity less immediately aligned with or intelligible within these privacy-centric narratives. In the motto that epitomizes the liberatory role attributed to online anonymity in early net culture ('On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'), anonymity designates a particular mode of sociality and culture that is impersonal or even anti-personal, ephemeral, collective, authorless and in that sense 'nameless' and 'faceless'. Today, imageboards like 4chan continue to cultivate and embrace anonymity in this sense, as a mediatic condition post-humaine. The article aims to show that these forms of anti-and impersonal media prosumption have their roots in a more encompassing tradition of popular mass media culture, against which the right to privacy was originally asserted. As a value, privacy is linked to class-specific anxieties over the increasingly anonymous and impersonal forces of mass modernity and its new media publics, whose profane curiosity desired to 'bring things closer' by means of their technological reproduction. The emergent mass culture threatened dominant bourgeois values of personal autonomy and selfhood historically and culturally implied in the idea of a right to privacy. The resulting understanding of anonymity and its relation to privacy suggests an alternative perspective on what is at stake in the politics of online anonymity today.
Book Reviews by Daniel de Zeeuw
Tags: book review, new media, social media Do we still live in a mass society? Does that foul spe... more Tags: book review, new media, social media Do we still live in a mass society? Does that foul spectre of the long and dark 20 th century -the masses -extend into the 21 st ? We would perhaps like to believe that it does not. Or should we say they do not? Part of the anxiety over this strange socio-logical category can already be glimpsed from this, its grammatically-undecidable, ambiguous status, forever oscillating between the singular and the plural form. We would like to think that ours is not a 'mass' but a 'network' society. And this is true, provided we understand the network as a postmodern kind of pseudosociality always retreating from the threshold of community. Similarly, the concept of the masses represents this permanently liminal situation between belonging and non-belonging. It is in the
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Papers by Daniel de Zeeuw
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).
In: Krisis 2014-II http://krisis.eu/content/2014-2/krisis-2014-2-07-deZeeuw.pdf
Articles by Daniel de Zeeuw
Series edited by Janez Janša
Language: English
https://aksioma.org/Daniel-de-Zeeuw-Notes-from-the
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).
Book Reviews by Daniel de Zeeuw
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).
In: Krisis 2014-II http://krisis.eu/content/2014-2/krisis-2014-2-07-deZeeuw.pdf
Series edited by Janez Janša
Language: English
https://aksioma.org/Daniel-de-Zeeuw-Notes-from-the
Is the idea of society as the totality of individuals the only way of envisioning human sociality, or is it only a historically determined construct? What other dimensions emerge when we shift from thinking in terms of individuals to dividuals and their assembling into condividuals? Which are the political implications of this shift in the contemporary capitalism that already operates on a condividual level? Starting from these questions, the Dutch media theorist Daniel de Zeeuw explored the visions exposed during a two-day event, inspired by Marco Deseriis’s book, Proper and Improper Names – Identity in the Information Society (Ljubljana, 17–18 October 2017). During the event an inquiry into the status of the individual was conducted through the notion of the trans and condividual (Deseriis) as well as the dividual (Gerald Raunig), and the political and artistic practices they engage in (Wu Ming 1 and Natalie Bookchin).