“The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment. Not least to blame for the withering of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality, assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy of things..”- Theodor Adorno, Minimia Moralia, Do Not Knock
The left, in the West, has done itself a disservice, or rather, several disservices all in rapid succession since the eventual collapse of the New Left and the birth of the post-modern. The birth of the post-modern, and the reason for the quote I’ve chosen above to introduce this writing are connected. It’s undeniable at this point that the germination of the post-modern predates the failures of ‘68, and that, perhaps, we could have held firm for another several years against the fascist, and I do mean fascist in the most practical sense, the praxis of the bourgeois class, offensive against workers. It may, of course, be worth noting that this would culminate, perhaps in the final moment of hope for global communism at the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Fukuyama’s declaration that we had witnessed the end of history.
It may be that these events, all interconnected produced a kind of collective dissociation, or rather, reassociation, you see, up until the post-war (and I will say here, though it may be an aggressive claim, post-cold war) period, the working class had some sense of identity. It was rooted in communities, and found in the spaces where we gather ourselves, it was oppositional and defiant, and found in union halls. It was merciful and kind, and is still, to this day at times, seen when striking workers in necessary roles for society continue to perform their labor, simply without pay. The working class identity, thus, was at one time, polemical. In the post-Fukuyama world, this was no longer true. The time in the post ‘68 era was replete with a number of shifts that ultimately come to define this greater shift.
The universalization of power is the first amongst these, the generalized opposition to power, an insane and non substantive position is necessary to the development of this post-ideology. You see, without this key Foucaultian development, the rest of the pieces never fall into play. So, as the post-modern ideology (the ideology which we will associate with the economics of the burgeoning Reaganites through the modern era) is hitting its bud break, this stem becomes ossified. You see, if you can say that all power is equally harmful, that all authority is equally damaging, that all things are related back to the prison then we cut off the left from any sort of sincere efforts to learn. This power, in a constant flux ended up serving the interests, not of the disempowered, though, based on Foucault’s opinions on marxism (that it is a dead ideology), it should be clear the results of this.
He was left, instead of with a critique of power, with the absolutization of it to the point of meaninglessness, you see, this is where, negative philosophy, polemical lines must be drawn. It should be abundantly clear that to call all actions of power equal is not just useless but actively the result of a man who was either trying to actively poison the well of what could be utilized in our criticism of capital, or of a man who was so stone dumb that he could not have known better, I refuse to accept the latter. The results of Foucault’s critique became frightful, gone was the ability to recognize a power that we should be utilizing. Teacher-Student, Parent-Child these relations become confused. Afterall, if power relations should be changed, confronted, or abolished, why shouldn’t these?
The radicals who came before us did so in a tradition, one which was established over a long and bloody history of struggle, one which found its seed immanent in the speeches of the French Revolutionaries, which saw the terror and its application, and did not shy from it. It saw injustice, and heard the cry from the German Peasantry to the French. “City air makes you free.” The working class will ultimately lose the power struggle, but this does not decry all power, on the contrary it tells us something important, that power, and its questions, must be resolute in the working class before we can fully seize it, it is not that all power seeks is, as Foucault sees, its reproduction. He is, in many ways, a victim here, of his own ability to see issues. Like so many of the left-fascoid philosophers he is reduced, through his own hatred of the modern and his inability to envision a forward path, to falling into the true trap of the spectacle, that it is in fact reality, that all there is is power, and that this will always be true.
Unfortunately, and the driving force of what will come out of this is that tradition that long ago is all but forgotten, but the living revolutionaries, those who exist in the world today, those who were imprisoned, fought, and survived, are also forgotten. Afterall, if the Student-Teacher power relation must be abolished, then I must learn nothing, or risk accidentally becoming the teacher. Gone is a dialectical relationship between these, with student and teacher constantly switching, the student at times illuminating through fresh eyes, the teacher training from experience, instead we are left with one option and one option only.
The rise of the performative-discursive analysis.
Repetition becomes the name of the game as the left begins to kowtow to the drum beat of post-modernism. We can’t really help it at this point, afterall, we’ve already accepted that to have a teacher is to accept the power relations that we want to abolish (because again, collectively, the left was intentionally led astray. Gone is the education of the youth, of new revolutionaries, of emerging minds, and what we are left with is the Subject, alone, and all important. Butler’s performative repetition, and Foucaults discursive analysis produce one simple result.
That because there is no reason to learn, no obligation to improve under teachers, and no interest in developing the only thing that can matter is to actualize your agency. To gain freedom, to do what you please because there is no absolute truth, reality becomes a myth. The realization of the performative-discursive analysis, the most abrasive and soul sucking form of it, is seen played out, a million times a day, when someone will speak out for themself, and there has been produced a key assumption.
That all human beings have become equally devoid of empathy. That as a result of the endless scroll, and the elimination of the constraints of time via the twitter algorithm and a lack of education in history, you too have been reduced to nothing but ironic distance as a means of communication. You have become a mirror of capital itself, just as they have, the embodiment of the false-consciousness described by Lukacs, unable to see the personal-social struggle as connected to their economic one. They lash out, accuse of personal insult, and begin the performance cycle all over again. You see, with increasingly rapid cycles of information passing before us, they have no reason to address genuine concerns.
The same becomes true in our media. As the news cycle speed increases the need for facts disappears, our aesthetic values fall apart, criticism becomes focused on turning the highest profit and not showcasing work as it is. The driving force of our development becomes lost. It was only in the post-war era, the era of the ready made prefab house, and the mcdonalds that we could truly see isolation on this scale. When we imagine the alienation of a worker in 1930 it feels almost pacific. You see, they lived in an area where people also worked, where children played, and where spaces available to the public still existed. You have a cul-de-sac, what a stunning shift in advantage no?
Without these social ties the working class falls apart, it becomes mirrored in the creation of certain types of art, and which we will call subset of utopias. The driving form of both American politics, and American cinema has become mirrored in our popular discourse. It may be said that this utopianism at its core identifies one thing: that the individual alone can overcome all of history. When the superhero team struggles the most powerful can arrive and produce great effects. Gone is the film that requires a team, the heist film is all but done away with, great drama is gone, as evidenced by The Revenant, wherein a silent film is recreated with all of the aesthetic sense of a toddler. Leonardo DiCaprio finally wins his oscar, and it’s for the most dull story of all time, one which passes on the message that your fight will never end, the screen goes black and his fight with the wolves has just begun. In his wake, the corpses of all those who helped to propel him forward.
But, perhaps it is worth noting the distinctly post-modern preoccupancy here with the dystopia. They become defined by the reality of our experience reflected back at us from an ironic distance, you no longer have to identify with a character because your reality becomes more comically dark than the television show, and it manages to mystify that. The fight for freedom is not the fight against the real enemy, the cold impersonality of capital, which exploits for one reason, because it is vampiric, necessitating the blood of the working class to fuel its own life, is replaced by a comically outstriped villain.
The great sin of Agent Smith in the Matrix becomes that he is different, and in this difference it is necessitated that both the protagonist and antagonist find their real enemy. It is not the impersonality of capital, it is not the millions of robots that impersonally drained humanity, it is the anomalous bad actor. The one iconographic moment of Agent Smith, that he acknowledges that he too is trapped in this machine, unable to become the true ideal of the capitalist, the independent actor, the all consuming controller of all capital. He does not act in the interest of liberation of humanity, but merely of the self. He is the foucauldian subject, seeking to become the Hegelian One, the self without contradiction, the most reactionary form of capital seeking to become the feudal lord. Not just a return to the existence of the king, but rather, the totalization of a global capital, and the willingness to pull the trigger to have it, even at the expense of other capitalists.
He becomes the repetitive discourse, shaping the world not through his own ideology or will, but by simple self replication, it is through this replication of the absolute subject that he asserts himself. Through the act of “care of the self” the transformation of his life into an act of self-valorization. Agent Smith does not in the end see himself as different from Neo because the act of self-sacrifice becomes foreign to him, the idea that there is a purpose beyond the attainment of freedom becomes foreign in the way that the Other always is. There by, Agent Smith, through his assertion of himself as the dominant being, through his lack of fear of death and self-assurance, becomes innumerable. The singular subject is found in every being, all of them struggling for a release from the only thing that gives them power, their class. Death becomes unknowable, unfeared and undisturbing, and in this, they reveal their own immanent death, the process that began the moment they were born, the always-already final moment.
Likewise, we see the worst and most oppressive feature of A Clockwork Orange is not the abject poverty of Alex’s family, no, it is indeed that he is forced into subjugation (which could never work on you, the viewer, of course), never is it interrogated whether he would have been violent without being surrounded by violence, it’s simply assumed, it is in his nature, the poor man, son of the working class to be violent. This requires subjugation, but, as always his violence will shine through, the corrupted. The working class, develops an inherent error to itself, that it must, necessarily, be violent, this violence is a necessity, indeed, it’s the violence of the sublime, the knight, the capitalist revolutionary, and the working class revolutionary.
It is in the bourgeois sublimation of the sublime that they solidify and entrench their right to power, you see the knight was noble, and necessary. The capitalist revolutionaries were motivated for freedom, a goal which they claim, has already been attained. But the freedom to starve, to die without healthcare, to labor and toil and have your labor, your very life bought up for profit, is surely not the freedom that was described by Saint-Just, “on’t allow there to be either unfortunates or any poor in the state. It’s only at this price that you will have a true revolution and republic. Who would be grateful to you for the unhappiness of the good and the happiness of the evil?”
The irony of course, of Alex, is that he is not ever truly free, even when he engages in the self-valorization that is advocated by the Foucauldian school, he is left with a simple reality: he is trapped, eternally, in poverty. His only hope is to get lucky, to steal a large enough amount, jobs are scarce, and his family is poor, there is no release when the cage you’re trapped in is permeating everywhere you look. This leads to one position, that there is no way to rattle the chains hard enough that the lock can be reached. That he alone is uselessly trapped and so he must find a way to survive, the reality for so many of the working class today, a reflection of society, that even in its fascistic mockery of our conditions is left without the ability to ever identify its object, instead becoming self-referential.
This resultant situation is a population that has already given themselves up to engaging in isolated struggles, which as Lukacs tells us in Class Consciousness, will never find us the results we were seeking to achieve. The spectacle became totalized under the post-modern as ideology was replaced with discourse, and the social relations of production were replaced with vague hand waving to powers.
Certainly, the dystopian film most clearly epitomizes the latter, where in, a hero can simply occupy space and by virtue of this vulgar survivalist somehow achieve victory. The problem, of course, is not that this train of thought was allowed to exist, but rather, that it has not been combated internally. We have allowed for the depersonalized, ideology free sanitized working class to come about as a mirror to capital, post-modernity is about pragmatism, and so it has come full circle that the early American pragmatism, which was so confronted by the romantics, came back into vogue. But then we are given the question, how do we resolve this issue?
Finally we have reached the essence of Baudrillard, that the symbols we see have lost their object, they no longer signify a real thing, they instead become self referential. Pop culture folding in on itself, an absolute meaninglessness defined by a subject without an object, just as the individual becomes increasingly isolated, so do our aesthetics. Cultural memory is shortened by an ever accelerating cycle of production, desperately trying to keep up with falling profits. The machine that is capital forces the working class into an increasingly strained role, working more for less money, with less benefit involved on all sides. The reserve army of the unemployed shrinks, though only nominally through the introduction of the gig economy, the blood drawn from our veins gets thinner every year, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it.
The world historic empire is not crumbling, it is desperately attempting to forestall the river’s flow as it wears out valley, and it knows that it can do it, but only at the expense of humanity. Speech becomes mitigated and limited, the social becomes replaced with a reflection of sociality via social media, and the performative becomes all that’s left. As social media continues to benefit the most shrill, and often least informed voice, the one that howls in the loudest fake outrage generates the strongest response. Indeed, human emotion becomes blunted, and how can you respond appropriately to sincere atrocity when every event is an outrage? The absolute credulity of the working class is a necessity, to accept whatever you are spoon fed, like a toddler. Because you have no connections to people around you these ideas that get airplaned into your mouth by the mother that is civil society have to be accepted, and if they are not, of course, the father of political society is there to assure that coercion can be enforced.
This all of course coincides with their opposition to any level of question, any hint that the ideas that you are spoon fed are not in fact steak, but apple sauce. That maybe this dumbed down version of reality is not to be questioned, merely accepted, you see, if you pull too hard on the curtain then you’re left with the truth that behind the curtain is not a man trying to attack you, but rather that you’ve been hooked up to an IV drawing your blood since the day you were born. That you are the oil that lubricates this massive, uncaring machine, the God of the old testament, larger than you could imagine, and uncaring for your issues, but furious at your failures. There is no purpose to resisting this, you are told, because to do so would be dangerous, you will make this uncaring machine have to lash out and course correct. Meanwhile, the machine is rusting, as no amount of lubrication will prevent the collapse of the machine.
Zizek, the poster boy for inaction, tells us wearing an I Would Prefer Not To shirt that we can just wait for capital to fail. This is true, but to do so is to guarantee that every drop of blood is sucked from the working class in an effort to keep the machine alive. His stance, that we must simply wait, flies in the face of all that we’ve learned since Hegel, that nothing can be known or changed unless it is acted upon. We’ve learned to know capital, we are active participants in its praxis whether we want to be or not, the machine continues to drive forward. The clearest stance he takes, eternally, is that we must do a modern reinterpretation of the work of Henri DeMann, that we must assume capital relies on psychological principles.
It is easy to imagine how, say, a person at the bar, someone who has to simply sit and make the real rational could reach this point. Afterall, my life is difficult because of things other people do consciously, surely there must be something psychological to this. To a so-called marxist scholar this should be blatantly clear in its falsehood, indeed, Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen all understood this to be false, and they didn’t have themselves to study. Meanwhile, the fascistic Zizek, as his predecessor Sorel before him, seeks to disrupt and mystify all understandng of the reality of capital, but unlike Sorel, he lacks the personal courage to admit that his violence is inherent. You see, unlike Sorel’s advocacy for violence against socialist elements, Zizek begs us to kneel down, sit in our handcuffs, and wait for the bullet to bring silence. To do nothing to change it means our death, the alternative means to learn to survive, and eventually, to thrive. But, then, that requires that we are not alone.
Debray in Critique of Political Reason points to an interesting issue. Alienation is broken down in one way and one way only, by us seeing each other in intimate moments, in the throes of pain, suddenly in that moment of humanity, devoid of the grasp of capital, we are given back our humanity without having to view it through fog. In the moments when a mother saves a child, admiration is near universal, when a loved one is lost, or when we are in a truly personal struggle. Thus, it has become necessary that the communists must no longer be willing to hang our hats on the adage that “everything is political”, though it has value in some specific cases (I am a student of Brecht and will, as he did, use everything I can). Rather, we must show that in these human moments, when the political sphere is broken down, when we connect on deeply human levels, that this act of detournement, a moment snatched from the spectacle, is the moment where we can teach.
When the spectacle is all consuming, and pushing you towards constant Althusserian anti-humanism, or alternatively into morbid realism, we are left with only one choice. Which is to turn the idea of everything being political into a reality. We must accept that our experiences are more common than we admit, and that the vampiric enemy we face, it doesn’t hate us, that is a personal feeling. Rather, capital simply does not care if you live or die, so long as every ounce of value has been extracted. It is not the constantly exerting biopolitical enemy of Foucault, or the personal bad guy of cinema, rather it is a massive machine feeding you cinema and the destruction of time via the algorithm. It does not care if you live any more than an engine cares that it has a driver, it cares only that you are fuel. But as we know, from our studies in dialectics, in birth death is immanent and destruction and creation find their synthesis in becoming. That is the reality for the working class, that it was born to destroy itself, and in the process, find it's own liberation.
コメント