Left solidarity needs to venture offline
Bruce Robinson ( Solidarity 316) is right. My claim that networked communications foreclose politics was too extreme. I revised it in the version of the essay that appeared in my book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. There I express the idea as the displacement of politics. (The terms “foreclosure” and “displacement’ come from psychoanalysis. The implication of “foreclosure” is that only psychotic acting out and violence is possible. The implication of “displacement” is that political action takes place not in the site of antagonism but elsewhere.) Why exactly was my earlier claim too...