The Future is Stupid
I’ve watched the Putin interview once, with several interruptions. My thoughts, written quick.
It is a significant interview. Anybody who thinks that we shouldn’t watch it has lost the thread. However, it is not as ground breaking as the Oliver Stone interviews, which, in my view, are of truly historic interest.
From a media studies perspective I would say that it is boring: it is newspaper portrayed on television. The idea of a “serious conversation” means to scale back, regress, to a time when radio was giving way to newspaper. Putin is correct that the world is changing, whether we accept it or not, and that the West is clinging to yesterday. But we can see that he is just as nostalgic as the rest of us. We are caught in a dance: we see in Putin what we deny in ourselves, and he sees in us what he denies in himself. He denies that the soul can be split and yet nonetheless insists upon a multipolar vision.
It is always a question of how to confront the cutting edge of the real.
There is something strange here, and I say it only in a psychoanalytic sense: stupidity versus intelligence. To his credit, Putin may be the most intelligent leader of the contemporary era. I am not much in doubt about this. Yet, this is also my critique of him: he narrates, historicizes, and so on. On this point, he reminds me, suddenly, of Hilary Clinton. Clinton on twitter resembles a student of the old classroom, writing linear truth-based essays for her professor. This is also Putin on television. One must understand the properties of the Television and the contours of the current discourse.
He is correct when he calls — not in this interview — America and the West an empire of lies, but this is not necessarily a critique. I think that the problem with Putin is precisely that he is speaking honestly, sincerely, that he fully believes what he is saying. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who does not accept lies as a part of their discourse. This is also what marks the profound violence of the courtroom.
Moreover, he is correct to diagnose the contestation of paradigms against American pragmatism. Yet, he sees this as a part of the old world rather than the new. It is clear that pragmatism, particularly under the engine of scientific discourse and mobilized by capitalism, is precisely what brings us toward the current global crisis.
Our problem, in the West, is to go looking for either metaphors or madness in the souls of others. On this point, we should do what do we best, and what Tucker does well: remain naïve, stupid. Honestly, this is a path forward for the Western empire. To put it into a slogan: the future is stupid.
