"What if the sense of alienation provoked by the internet is not an indication of isolation or “loneliness,” but rather a pessimism or even nihilism resulting from the fact that civil society’s excess of political consciousness has “nowhere to go” in the existing structures of politics?"
Why not both? An internet-mediated civic and social consciousness seems like it offers the worst of both worlds, it is both so unembodied and non-human as to satiate none of the human animal's needs for socialization and companionship but also an extremely potent drug for stoking the sense of collective outrage and disgust and alienation that dissolves the legitimacy of the institutions stuck with the burden of existing in actual real life.
It's a good point well made that there is something deeply connective and collectivist about politics via screens that the "atomization" frame elides, we do find a community of sorts among the quasi-anonymous strangers in that void. But I don't think that necessarily refutes the view that such a "civil society" is toxic soil from which only a paranoid, non-materially grounded and fundamentally destructive politics can grow, with the left's refraction through these same channels over the past decade offering a pretty stark example.
This is a good question; I do think it's both in some way I haven't fully worked out. I wanted this piece to go further in dialogue with Jäger and see if there is a way to reconcile what I'm saying here with his theory of hyperpolitics, but it was getting unwieldy. I hope to explore that more in a future post.
I don't think that treating online politics analytically as a form of civil society that deserves closer empirical inspection (as opposed to moralizing cliches) means automatically holding that it is *good* or *healthy*, or somehow a perfect recreation of an older form of civil society. In fact, I think this view Ganz is articulating allows us to see how it could be "toxic"; elsewhere he has been articulating a view that civil society without the transcendent function of the state is by definition a cauldron of self-seeking, a mob.
It seems to me at this point that Jäger is only worried about the toxicity of hyperpolitics to the extent it is performative and powerless for the left and therefore enabling a continuity of neoliberalism; he (following Riley) strenuously rejects the fascism analogy. Whereas I think seeing it as a form of civil society overdevelopment and frustrated democratic demands, rather than atomization, perhaps draws appropriate attention to how it might be an energetic, organized force of destruction.
I know you’re not one of the leftists who look back on a decade of mobbing and cancellation from the left with apologetics because Trump is worse but please explain the glaring inconsistency here. Why was that period of “exhorting people to attack their opponents online and flag posts that express inappropriate views,” of “armies of citizens getting people fired,” of tirades against free speech in the name of some bogus arguments about freedom of association, of “online threats and employer pressure, sometimes promoted from the White House” not also “analogous to classic fascist mobilization,” even though different in form? Could we call it left fascism after Adorno or Habermas? Or is Trumpism not in fact analogous to classic fascist mobilization because it’s just analogous to plain old classic mobilization?
"Mobbing and cancellation" is not on its own "fascist mobilization" on either side. Contra the often hysterical dominant view, I think "mobbing and cancellation" is just politics in an unruly digital form that people are freaking out about because it is somewhat new. As Ganz has pointed out, cancellation is not an abrogation of free speech, it IS free speech—an overabundance of it. We might say that its aburd and toxic features and incidents are a result of the unresponsiveness of politics to this upsurge of energy in civil society.
Now to the important distinctions between left and right. Left-wing "mobbing and cancellation" surged upward from civil society into some heights of institutional power, but that institutional power itself tended to be part of civil society: universities, nonprofits, cultural institutions, the media, etc. The right (and some of the center) has tried to created a false narrative that this constituted some kind of elite-driven, top-down totalitarian project, but that was never the case; what the 2010s ultimately showed was the *weakness* of these seats of "cultural" power that the right constantly inflates. The important point is that left-wing populism never acquired significant state power; it was firmly rejected by the Democratic Party, which made concessions only in marginal rhetoric around the edges.
On the contrary, right-wing "mobbing and cancellation" laid siege to the traditional Republican Party, overthrew and replaced it. What Riley is calling "fascist mobilization" is concerted mobilization of "mobbing and cancellation" directly from the White House, which is mirrored in a highly organized authoritarian project seeping into many parts of the state itself. In other words, the Trumpist state is doing what left-wing cancellers never even dreamed of doing; Biden tweeting for his supporters to get people fired from their jobs is unimaginable.
Well said. This issue is one of the primary reasons I find Ganz's framing of "excess civil society" compelling – but also why I question if "civil society" of private self-interest is actually the proper label for this activity in the first place.
I didn't have the Hegelian background to pose any sharp questions on "civil society" until recently (recent reading of Ganz's sources, Avineri and Ruda, written of in my "Detachment and Deliberation" here: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/detachment-and-deliberation), but that's what I'm thinking about now that I do.
I will check it out. I am partial to the Hegelian use of the notion, of civil society as encompassing the division of labor/commerce plus all the varied intermediate organizations. Anyhow I now balk at the Gramscian conception of civil society that sees this as a stand in terrain for political struggle. I mean if you are in a revolutionary party which realizes that it can't capture state power through political force and must work within social and ideological institutions of course, civil society is going to look like a war zone on your way to capturing state power. But if you're not a Leninist civil society is broad enough to encompass lots of phenomena that are not zero sum struggles for power or legitimacy. Not everything is a move in a game of ideological hegemony. There needs to be room for minority positions and normal contestation. We don't live in a world where a battle between two classes or even two ideologies is the organizing principle of civil society. If there is in fact a surfeit of unrest that is not captured by the parties, groups, or other para-organizations of political society and a deficit of intermediate organizations that can channel people into other more productive non-political pursuits, that may be. Classic case of anomic heightened expectations beyond what can be delivered. But I don't know how that is captured by "excess civil society" rather than excessive politicalization, insufficient political outlets, excessive expectations, relative deprivation, except that it slots it into a midcentury debates about one period in history that is not super enlightening because we can now see that these things are recurring phenomena and usually whatever is pointed to about the origins of fascism turns out not to be unique to fascism.
"What if the sense of alienation provoked by the internet is not an indication of isolation or “loneliness,” but rather a pessimism or even nihilism resulting from the fact that civil society’s excess of political consciousness has “nowhere to go” in the existing structures of politics?"
Why not both? An internet-mediated civic and social consciousness seems like it offers the worst of both worlds, it is both so unembodied and non-human as to satiate none of the human animal's needs for socialization and companionship but also an extremely potent drug for stoking the sense of collective outrage and disgust and alienation that dissolves the legitimacy of the institutions stuck with the burden of existing in actual real life.
It's a good point well made that there is something deeply connective and collectivist about politics via screens that the "atomization" frame elides, we do find a community of sorts among the quasi-anonymous strangers in that void. But I don't think that necessarily refutes the view that such a "civil society" is toxic soil from which only a paranoid, non-materially grounded and fundamentally destructive politics can grow, with the left's refraction through these same channels over the past decade offering a pretty stark example.
This is a good question; I do think it's both in some way I haven't fully worked out. I wanted this piece to go further in dialogue with Jäger and see if there is a way to reconcile what I'm saying here with his theory of hyperpolitics, but it was getting unwieldy. I hope to explore that more in a future post.
I don't think that treating online politics analytically as a form of civil society that deserves closer empirical inspection (as opposed to moralizing cliches) means automatically holding that it is *good* or *healthy*, or somehow a perfect recreation of an older form of civil society. In fact, I think this view Ganz is articulating allows us to see how it could be "toxic"; elsewhere he has been articulating a view that civil society without the transcendent function of the state is by definition a cauldron of self-seeking, a mob.
It seems to me at this point that Jäger is only worried about the toxicity of hyperpolitics to the extent it is performative and powerless for the left and therefore enabling a continuity of neoliberalism; he (following Riley) strenuously rejects the fascism analogy. Whereas I think seeing it as a form of civil society overdevelopment and frustrated democratic demands, rather than atomization, perhaps draws appropriate attention to how it might be an energetic, organized force of destruction.
I know you’re not one of the leftists who look back on a decade of mobbing and cancellation from the left with apologetics because Trump is worse but please explain the glaring inconsistency here. Why was that period of “exhorting people to attack their opponents online and flag posts that express inappropriate views,” of “armies of citizens getting people fired,” of tirades against free speech in the name of some bogus arguments about freedom of association, of “online threats and employer pressure, sometimes promoted from the White House” not also “analogous to classic fascist mobilization,” even though different in form? Could we call it left fascism after Adorno or Habermas? Or is Trumpism not in fact analogous to classic fascist mobilization because it’s just analogous to plain old classic mobilization?
"Mobbing and cancellation" is not on its own "fascist mobilization" on either side. Contra the often hysterical dominant view, I think "mobbing and cancellation" is just politics in an unruly digital form that people are freaking out about because it is somewhat new. As Ganz has pointed out, cancellation is not an abrogation of free speech, it IS free speech—an overabundance of it. We might say that its aburd and toxic features and incidents are a result of the unresponsiveness of politics to this upsurge of energy in civil society.
Now to the important distinctions between left and right. Left-wing "mobbing and cancellation" surged upward from civil society into some heights of institutional power, but that institutional power itself tended to be part of civil society: universities, nonprofits, cultural institutions, the media, etc. The right (and some of the center) has tried to created a false narrative that this constituted some kind of elite-driven, top-down totalitarian project, but that was never the case; what the 2010s ultimately showed was the *weakness* of these seats of "cultural" power that the right constantly inflates. The important point is that left-wing populism never acquired significant state power; it was firmly rejected by the Democratic Party, which made concessions only in marginal rhetoric around the edges.
On the contrary, right-wing "mobbing and cancellation" laid siege to the traditional Republican Party, overthrew and replaced it. What Riley is calling "fascist mobilization" is concerted mobilization of "mobbing and cancellation" directly from the White House, which is mirrored in a highly organized authoritarian project seeping into many parts of the state itself. In other words, the Trumpist state is doing what left-wing cancellers never even dreamed of doing; Biden tweeting for his supporters to get people fired from their jobs is unimaginable.
Well said. This issue is one of the primary reasons I find Ganz's framing of "excess civil society" compelling – but also why I question if "civil society" of private self-interest is actually the proper label for this activity in the first place.
I didn't have the Hegelian background to pose any sharp questions on "civil society" until recently (recent reading of Ganz's sources, Avineri and Ruda, written of in my "Detachment and Deliberation" here: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/detachment-and-deliberation), but that's what I'm thinking about now that I do.
I will check it out. I am partial to the Hegelian use of the notion, of civil society as encompassing the division of labor/commerce plus all the varied intermediate organizations. Anyhow I now balk at the Gramscian conception of civil society that sees this as a stand in terrain for political struggle. I mean if you are in a revolutionary party which realizes that it can't capture state power through political force and must work within social and ideological institutions of course, civil society is going to look like a war zone on your way to capturing state power. But if you're not a Leninist civil society is broad enough to encompass lots of phenomena that are not zero sum struggles for power or legitimacy. Not everything is a move in a game of ideological hegemony. There needs to be room for minority positions and normal contestation. We don't live in a world where a battle between two classes or even two ideologies is the organizing principle of civil society. If there is in fact a surfeit of unrest that is not captured by the parties, groups, or other para-organizations of political society and a deficit of intermediate organizations that can channel people into other more productive non-political pursuits, that may be. Classic case of anomic heightened expectations beyond what can be delivered. But I don't know how that is captured by "excess civil society" rather than excessive politicalization, insufficient political outlets, excessive expectations, relative deprivation, except that it slots it into a midcentury debates about one period in history that is not super enlightening because we can now see that these things are recurring phenomena and usually whatever is pointed to about the origins of fascism turns out not to be unique to fascism.