Nico Metten: Libertarian
Nico Metten is a young German sound designer with a ponytail. He is also someone with interesting views on the question of immigration and national border controls. In a nutshell, he wants to encourage and massively extend the former as a good thing per se, whilst completely dissolving the latter as a matter of principle.
For Nico is a libertarian. He also openly admits to being an idealist which, in his case, means he is someone who believes that everyone is just like him; namely, an abstract labour unit. Or, at least, they should be. Otherwise he's fully prepared to subject them to the law, thereby equating radical difference or any form of otherness that can't be subsumed within a universal humanism, with criminality and terrorism.
Nico doesn't conceive of those who care nothing for freedom - understood primarily as the freedom of the market place - or bourgeois individualism. That some men and women might value fulfilment over freedom and find such collectively as members of a people, is not something he even stops to consider.
Besides, a global economy will put an end to such social primitivism in favour of the systematic anarchy and triumphant philistinism which he, Nico, favours, but which, as Nietzsche points out, allows someone only as much culture as it is in the interest of commerce that they should possess. If old ways of being persist, they may do so only as lifestyles; i.e. as commodities that afford men and women the chance to dress-up and indulge in colourful games of nostalgic make-believe, but not to opt-out of the New World Order.
Of course, Nico is right to argue that many people have been granted human rights within the above and we should not simply dismiss this fact. But, on the other hand, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, human rights ultimately fail to address or compensate for the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered."
And so, sorry Nico, but I'm unconvinced by your attempts to politically theorize; one respectfully suggests that you don't give up the day job. And maybe think about a haircut.
And so, sorry Nico, but I'm unconvinced by your attempts to politically theorize; one respectfully suggests that you don't give up the day job. And maybe think about a haircut.
Note: Lines quoted from Deleuze and Guattari are in What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.
