Adbusters’ Beautiful Soul
I recently received an email from Adbuster’s that neatly summarized precisely what is wrong with the World’s left today and what we must overcome if we are to even begin to offer a leftward vision for a new society during this time of global crisis. The email was entitled #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and it was a call for a shift in tactics in line with the Egyptian rebellion and the assembly movement in Spain. 
The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people’s assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
The troubles with this strategy are twofold. First, this is a way to keep one’s hands clean while being seen to resist as it aims at seizing symbolic targets but has no consequential aim, and secondly and more importantly, the concept of a singular demand that would propel us toward radical democracy sidesteps what is really at stake or what we really desire, and instead becomes a way of ensuring that things stay the same. By making one abstract demand the Adbuster protesters will maintain their position as the abject or, to pick up the title from Puerto de Sol’s encampment movement “the Indignant,” both by demanding recognition from the powers that be and by tasking the system to fix itself rather than seeking a means to either fix the system collectively through specific struggle toward a new system and a new basis of power.
The candidates for this central demand clarify the failure even further:
“We demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”
First, this is a demand that is designed to never be met because the mission of the Presidential Commission is open ended, even infinite. Any commission tasked with finding and ending the ‘influence of money’ in Washington would have to work round the clock or spearhead a revolution against itself. This leads to the second problem with this demand. Given the influence of money on politics no Presidential Commission would ever have the teeth required to even begin to fix the problem.
Adbusters goes on to say that a long term commitment to an encampment outside the White House of 20,000 people making this demand would force “our government to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.” Of course, this isn’t true. Obama would say, quite rightly, that he’s sympathetic to the goals of the movement but that the demand is immature to the point of being indecipherable. He would then point to some pre-existing ethics committee, or some bill that puts limits on campaign financial support from Corporations, or even something that expands the power of corporations as evidence of how he is already engaged with fixing Washington precisely along the lines the protesters are demanding.
The Egyptians didn’t demand that Mubarak form a commission which would end corruption in his regime, they called for his head, and while this is light years more than what Adbusters is organizing, it still wasn’t enough.
Perhaps we’re not ready for a break from this system, maybe revolution isn’t just around the corner because, for one thing, the left is in no shape to take power. Fine. Then let’s make some demands for stuff that we really want instead. Let’s hit the streets against Obama’s healthcare and for Single Payer, for the Employee free Choice Act and against the various attacks on public workers, against the bank’s right to foreclose on properties that were fraudulently acquired and for the people’s right to stay in their home. Let’s struggle for public housing as a solution to the foreclosure crisis.
The trouble right now isn’t a lack of collective will toward protest or resistance, the trouble is a lack of faithfulness to our desire to actually make changes, and a lack of confidence that systemic change, or change to the basis of our system, is possible.
“The Tenacity of Hope”- Veterans for Peace Exhibit features Dan Shea
I’m lucky because I can namedrop Dan Shea and be confident that not only do I know his work, but I can count him as a friend. I met Dan Shea back in the early 90s when I was a returning student at PSU after dropping out of a school in Florida and Dan was a new student after engaging in class war for decades and finally finding himself out of luck and needing to start over. Our experience of school, our approach toward education, art, life, were very different then. While I saw the University as a holding pen or a limbo between childhood and something unimaginable, Dan looked at the University as a space to be both contested and embraced. He pursued a Master’s degree in art, founded the radical student group Student’s for Unity, turned in photographs to the official student paper called the Vanguard while helping to start the alternative leftist paper the Rearguard, taught classes, led fights, and generally altered the institution he was in, if only for a moment.
On August 4th Veterans for Peace will bring “The Tenacity of Hope” exhibit to PSU’s Smith Memorial Student Union, and my friend Dan Shea’s work will be displayed as a part of the Veterans Group Exhibit in the Littman Gallery. Dan wrote the Exhibit statement, which I will not quote at length here, but which describes how what Veteran for Peace aims to bring what he and others saw during their time at war as well as what they dreamed and continue to dream. In his typical fashion Dan has turned this exhibit into a call for a kind of revolution, and I urge all of my reader in Portland to attend and see Dan’s memories and dreams for themselves. He has a way of clarifying with the lines he draws, a tendency that he brings to both his canvasses and to his life.
Structuralism vs. Post-Structuralism
Today I spoke to the cultural critic and professor Ted Friedman about, among other things, Roland Barthes, and as we discussed how Barthes’ concept of myth might be synonymous with Althusser’s ISA and arrived at the strange conclusion that Joseph Campbell, Barthes, and Althusser were all really pointing at the same thing (for a full explanation of this read Friedman’s essay at Flow on the subject), Friedman pointed to a move from structuralism to post-structuralism that could be discerned in Barthes’ essays. This sent me reaching for what I consider to be the definitive book on the subject of both Structuralism and Poststructuralism, and I was glad to discover I had not already sold it (Donald Palmer’s Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for beginners) back to Powells already.
According to Donald Palmer one possible exemplar of both Structuralism and Post-Structuralism is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Palmer wrote:
“If ‘structuralism’ turns out to be the application of Saussurean linguistics to explain the inherent structure of all forms of human activity, including mental activity and pathological behavior, then Jacques Lacan is a structuralist. And if Post-Structuralism is the radicalization of Saussure’s linguistics to challenge the notion of structural stability, then Lacan is also a post-structuralist.”
In today’s blog entry I thought I’d quickly illustrate what this means with nostalgic youtube videos. According to Lacan our unconscious itself is structured like a language. That is, our unconscious is made up of signs that are arbitrary both in the way they are embodied and their meaning. For instance, the word river is a set of sounds that etymology does not explain how the noises involved in making the word connect to the concept. For example, the Indonesian word Jayus has no corollary in English, but means something like the “a joke so poorly told that one has to laugh.” Lacan claims that our unconscious is thereby shaped by these kinds of arbitrary signs and their relationships. In fact, the unconscious would be collective or public, not because of any quasi spiritual substance, but merely because it was historically and collectively produced.
However, Lacan moves to post structuralism when he claims that there is no meaning outside of these arbitrary signs. This move can be easy to misapprehend…it may lead to a ambition to become the arbitrary sign or to be real by denying meaning. This is perhaps why resistance to authority today is mostly conformist and limited in its ambition. We struggle today to become arbitrary, to remain small, and finally to evaporate all together. We become the arbitrary or contingent signs that we are attempting to resist.
Capitalism and God (or what if the UFOs never arrive?)
“Capital is dead,” McKenzie Wark told me during our recent conversation for the Diet Soap podcast. “And we killed it.”
Wark’s new book “The Beach Beneath the Street” is a prequel to his 2004 detourned text “The Hacker Manifesto.” A social history of the Situationist International (a Marxist band of revolutionary hooligans who got started in the France of the 1950s) his book traces the development of what aimed to be revolutionary ideas. However, what moved McKenzie to paraphrase Neitzche’s Madman allegory was not the SI but the simple and central fact of our present moment.
The Economic crisis of 2008 demonstrated that there was no such thing as Capital. Our collective project since Lehman Brother’s collapse has been to paper over this basic fact.
“Whither is God?” [Neitzche's Madman] cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”
In order to understand our predicament, in order to fathom Wark’s position in relation to Capital, it is important to realize that a dead God is often more pervasive, more diffuse, and more repressive than a living God. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo he describes how the idea of the dead father is the repressive force of authority in civilization. Freud argues that patricide is literally our foundational primal scene. Later on Zizek would clarify that this patricide only seemed real to Freud because it is a necessary pre-requisite for patriarchial authority. It’s necessary precisely because patriarchal authority is always spectral, symbolic, or imaginary.
There is always a madman in the marketplace. Understanding this, understanding that value or God is always already dead, that both are most effective when taken to be illusions, Wark’s next move becomes comprehensible.
In my recent conversation with Professor McKenzie Wark he first declared that Capital or value was dead, and then he proceeded to run away from it.
“Maybe there was an opportunity and the icons were the Paris Commune through May 1968, but we didn’t take the turn. Whether there really was a possible transformation or the illusion of it, either way we missed it. So the question is, what is the relationship between the struggles internal to the totality that is Capital on the one hand, and the relationship of that totality to another totality that is external to it? What is the relationship between Capitalism and nature not as a thing, but as an externality.”
Wark’s desire for an external intervention and his abandonment of internal space reminded me of nothing other than Stephen Speilberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That is, just as Roy Neary needed an external force to save him from his suburban nightmare, McKenzie the theorist seemed to require a UFO. But, I can’t really blame him for this.
In the 90s I too turned to the UFO as an icon of hope. The UFO was the ultimate externality. In the early 90s I would frequently take psychedelic drugs and imagine the day when saucers would land on the White House lawn. I thought that the current Capitalist nightmare might be punctured by a visit from little green men. They’d show themselves on television and then I’d be free. But, what I didn’t understand was that UFO already fit neatly into the current system.
Lacan is famous for saying that Woman does not exist, and by that he meant that woman as the pre-symbolic object of complete and authentic being did not exist. Well, flying saucers do not exist either.
The current reality that gives shape to our everyday lives is a fantasy, and as such it defines every externality in advance. To put it even more directly, something that does not exist does not have interiority. Conversely something that does not exist has nothing external to it.
Let’s reconsider Neitzsche’s Madman:
If God is dead, or if Capitalism relies on the production of a value that is just a convenient way for us to measure the exploitation of one class of people by another, then we are charged with the task of creating new games and new rituals of atonement. But, what we’ve discovered since Neitzsche’s time is that killing God is easy, in fact its preordained and necessary. The trick is convincing God of his own death, the trick is to transform all of our iPads into objects that realize how the value they appear to contain is only a spectre or a mystification.
Producing such a God, such an iPad, might require a revolution.
