Principles

A couple days ago I asked David Graeber a question about how far the difference between representative democracy and formal consensus process really goes in practice. In his answer he mentioned his (I think mild) regret that during the initial planning for Occupy Wall Street at Bowling Green, they never arrived at any founding principles. Consensus, he said, as a distinct process from democratic consensus (100% of a vote), works the way it’s supposed to when everyone has the same fundamental goals and principles. The answer surprised me a little bit coming from him, but I’m over it; the question of principles tends to get swallowed up by the controversy over demands, despite being different things, and everyone basically has to assume that they exist. Unfortunately, since there aren’t any, they sometimes conflict.

Even in more mundane activity, the “block” in formal consensus is supposed to mean principles are being violated. In their absence, blocks get overused, people get frustrated and leave, and this can easily overwhelm a GA’s ability to do much of anything beyond self-maintenance.

Given where the movement is now, it’s hard to imagine principles being any easier to agree on than unifying demands, except maybe for nonviolence. In this situation it seems to me the only way out is through: to address the problems with GA legitimacy/illegitimacy I’ve been discussing here, diversify as much as possible. Anything I can suggest is probably redundant or unnecessary for an occupation like Wall Street or Oakland, which are large and successful enough that their every action seems to force the state’s hand and initiates a self-sustaining dynamic (which includes productive internal criticism and adjustment). But for tiny occupations like mine that can stall out at the slightest disagreement and that are not constantly defending themselves from police, generate and maintain autonomously run working groups, workshops, discussion circles, actions. If there are enough people, start new GAs in different parts of the city. What we do will show us who we are.

What does a General Assembly do?

Lots of conversations lately about General Assemblies, especially following the big actions in Oakland. One (the port shutdown) had GA support, mass attendance, and a peaceful conclusion generally deemed successful; the other (the building takeover) did not consult the GA, was much less attended (though ~500 is nothing to sneer at), ended with a police battle, and was generally deemed a failure. One couldn’t ask for a more dramatic dichotomy of ideology or tactics.

Of course this isn’t just about Oakland — the conflict between those who feel the GA is the rightful center of democratic decision making and those who prioritize autonomous actions seems common to every Occupation. Is the GA, run using some variant of consensus process, the defining political form of this movement? Is it the sole arbiter of legitimacy? Or is the GA merely a tool for its component (and autonomous) affinity groups, working groups, magnets, committees, etc. (is it a mere coordinating body)? These are not complimentary positions — one must appear as a betrayal of principle to the other.

The Coming Insurrection was a very hip item in anarchist bookstores when it was translated from French in 2008. I don’t see many discussing it now. Whatever its overall applicability to the Occupy movement, it contains what is still my favorite critique of assemblies:

Sabotage every representative authority. Spread the palaver. Abolish general assemblies.

The first obstacle every social movement faces, long before the police proper, are the unions and the entire micro-bureaucracy whose job it is to control the struggle. Communes, collectives and gangs are naturally distrustful of these structures. That’s why the parabureaucrats have for the past twenty years been inventing coordination committees and spokes councils that seem more innocent because they lack an established label, but are in fact the ideal terrain for their maneuvers. When a stray collective makes an attempt at autonomy, they won’t be satisfied until they’ve drained the attempt of all content by preventing any real question from being addressed. They get fierce and worked up not out of passion for debate but out of a passion for shutting it down. And when their dogged defense of apathy finally does the collective in, they explain its failure by citing a lack of political consciousness. It must be noted that in France the militant youth are well versed in the art of political manipulation, thanks largely to the frenzied activity of various trotskyist factions. They could not be expected to learn the lesson of the conflagration of November 2005: that coordinations are unnecessary where coordination exists, organizations aren’t needed when people organize themselves.

Another reflex is to call a general assembly at the slightest sign of movement, and vote. This is a mistake. The business of voting and deciding a winner, is enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into a theater where all the various little pretenders to power confront each other. Here we suffer from the bad example of bourgeois parliaments. An assembly is not a place for decisions but for palaver, for free speech exercised without a goal.

The need to assemble is as constant among humans as the necessity of making decisions is rare. Assembling corresponds to the joy of feeling a common power. Decisions are vital only in emergency situations, where the exercise of democracy is already compromised. The rest of the time, “the democratic character of decision making” is only a problem for the fanatics of process. It’s not a matter of critiquing assemblies or abandoning them, but of liberating the speech, gestures, and interplay of beings that take place within them. We just have to see that each person comes to an assembly not only with a point of view or a motion, but with desires, attachments, capacities, forces, sadnesses and a certain disposition toward others, an openness. If we manage to set aside the fantasy of the General Assembly and replace it with an assembly of presences, if we manage to foil the constantly renewed temptation of hegemony, if we stop making the decision our final aim, then there is a chance for a kind of massification, one of those moments of collective crystallization where a decision suddenly takes hold of beings, completely or only in part.

The same goes for deciding on actions. By starting from the principle that “the action in question should govern the assembly’s agenda” we make both vigorous debate and effective action impossible. A large assembly made up of people who don’t know each other is obliged to call on action specialists, that is, to abandon action for the sake of its control. On the one hand, people with mandates are by definition hindered in their actions, on the other hand, nothing hinders them from deceiving everyone.

There’s no ideal form of action. What’s essential is that action assume a certain form, that it give rise to a form instead of having one imposed on it. This presupposes a shared political and geographical position – like the sections of the Paris Commune during the French Revolution – as well as the circulation of a shared knowledge. As for deciding on actions, the principle could be as follows: each person should do their own reconnaissance, the information would then be put together, and the decision will occur to us rather than being made by us. The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also the best form of coordination among different communes, the best way to put an end to hegemony.

The purely horizontal non-structure implied here reflects a completely different understanding of collective action than liberal or even Marxist-Leninist notions of democratic organization, including direct democracy. Conventional judgment calls it ‘ultra-leftist.’

The principle objection is that autonomous action at a scale or intensity that appears to contradict or undermine GA decisions is vanguardist with zero accountability, and thus divisive, irresponsible, and antidemocratic. This assumes that all visible action is representative of the Occupy movement, so if a group acts in spite of the GA, they are branded as hijackers (or hackers), those who claim the right of representation without going through any official democratic process.

Zunguzungu’s argument against the building occupation seems a little different. It doesn’t necessarily assume GA sovereignty, but instead concentrates on the unannounced action’s secrecy. For him the action wasn’t wrong on merits and it wasn’t wrong because it didn’t go through proper channels, it was wrong because it refused to make itself a topic of discussion. It refused to try to persuade the group as a whole to adopt its position, and as a result wasn’t large enough, needlessly endangering everyone involved and alienating potential supporters.

However, I don’t actually think there’s any real difference between these two. Zunguzungu is simply aware that no GA has claimed central authority for itself, and by embracing “diversity of tactics” they are tacitly condoning the actions of affinity groups. He thinks that an effective, disciplined democratic institution is necessary to protect the principle of inclusion. As the discussion here illustrates, a perhaps surprising consequence of inclusion is that there should be a distinction between Occupy, whose actions are centrally and democratically determined, and other groups who are not involved in the deliberations. As the commenters point out, this sets Occupy off from “the 99%” while still claiming to represent it. In the same way, even if they did operate under strict consensus process (and most do rely on a majority vote), GAs often don’t include many of the participants in the action being decided upon, much less “the 99%.” I tweeted a few days ago that the reality of the Occupy GA deconstructs any theoretical opposition between representative and direct democracy — it doesn’t seem that a democratic institution can ever truly become equivalent to its constituents. As Socialisme ou barbarie theorist Cornelius Castoriadis writes in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) there is a minimal degree of alienation involved in any political form:

“The social-historical dimension, as a dimension of the collective and the anonymous, initiates for each and every one of us a simultaneous relation of interiority and exteriority, of participation and exclusion, which can in no way be abolished or even ‘controlled’, in any definite sense of this term. The social is what is everyone and what is no one, what is never absent and almost never present as such, a non-being that is more real than any being, that in which we are wholly immersed yet which we can never apprehend ‘in person’…It is something that can be presented only in and through the institution but which is always infinitely more than the institution, what is formed by it, what continually overdetermines its functioning, and what in the final analysis founds it: creates it, maintains it in existence, alters it, destroys it.There is the social as instituted, but this always presupposes the social as instituting. ‘In ordinary times’ the social is manifested in the institution, but this manifestation is at once true and, in a sense, fallacious — as in those moments in which the social as instituting bursts onto the stage and pulls up its sleeves to get to work, the moments of revolution. But this work aims at an immediate result, which is to provide itself once again with an institution in order to exist in a visible manner — and once this institution is set in place the social as instituting slips away, puts itself at a distance, is already somewhere else.” (111-112)

Nowhere is the elusiveness of the truly democratic decision more apparent than in the vexed question of demands. Most occupations now have some sort of demands working group, through which demands, along with principles or statements of intent, are to be routed before presentation at the GA. The problem here is that the real power to represent the will of the 99% is the mandate of a group that operates autonomously from the GA, leaving the majority with the choice of whether or not to authorize a list it did not author. If any set of proposals manages to pass, as did happen with my home occupation, Occupy Austin, their inadequacy makes obvious the extent to which the GA, despite all talk of direct democracy, pure democracy, or consensus, is a representative body not fundamentally different from a parliament (it is deprofessionalized and procedurally much more responsible, but I still don’t think the revision is any more radical than, say, the Internet’s effect on music criticism). It’s no wonder there have had to be official statements dissociating the movement from these working groups or any other group, such as media or police liaison, that claims to give the movement an ideological ground that its diversity and rapid, ‘chaotic’ development constantly undercuts. They are all potential hijackers (for a necessary critique of the entire subject of demands, see this here).

Finally, the root of many of these concerns about the role of the GA is the fear that autonomous action risks ‘violence,’ a word I put in scare quotes because it’s hard to say these days what anyone means when they use it.

Nonviolence is a tactic, as its would-be debunkers always claim. More precisely it’s a media tactic. But for the very reason that the effectiveness of a nonviolent action is determined in the realm of appearance, of spectacle, it can’t be reduced to a mere appearance; nonviolence is also an ideology. It would be ineffective if practitioners weren’t committed to it in principle. Just as capitalists can’t stand outside capitalism and use it in a purely instrumental manner, just as they can’t mystify society without mystifying themselves (albeit in a class-specific manner), protest movements can’t use nonviolence without striving to be nonviolent. A nonviolent action in which someone throws a molotov at a cop effectively loses its nonviolent status. And that means any violent action — or anything that, like breaking windows, might be construed by someone with the power to decide these things as ‘violent’ — has to be repressed, or at the very least, dissociated from the ‘mainstream,’ ‘official’ movement.

Effective nonviolence, then, requires a strong GA, to propagate the idea of what nonviolence today is (counterintuitive to many people), to regulate the action and to define other actions as unauthorized. Conceived as a decision-making, governing body, the GA is the primary means by which the movement disciplines itself in the war to represent public opinion.

To repeat, in different language, the question I asked at the beginning: is the GA the culmination/restoration of democracy at the core of Occupy, a minimally repressive form of governance that tries to discipline without enforcement, that upholds the impossible ideal of pure consensus as a regulatory principle? Or is it not even primarily a deliberative body, but simply the medium through which the movement makes itself visible? Could there be a GA that makes announcements, debate, “palaver,” instead of decisions? An occupation that makes no attempt to institutionalize itself (which is not to say it fails to generate institutions)?

At any rate, it is my opinion that strategy, whether elite or collective, is weakened if it accepts taboos that restrict solidarity. If less than everything can be discussed and potentially executed outside of clandestine, after-hours meetings, then we’re still talking about moralism, not strategy.

The First Weekend of Occupy Austin

From its official beginning on Thursday through this weekend, Occupy Austin has gone through major changes very, very quickly. It’s ’franchise’ operations like these that will determine the future of the Occupy movement; that is, if it really is a movement and not just a long protest against Wall Street or a short-lived Internet fad. From my experience here, I can say that the Austin branch got off on a much less radical foot than some of its cousins in Boston, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, etc., but also that these difficulties expose some of the fault lines endemic to the movement and to the state of American populism more broadly.

The biggest issue has been with the initial assumptions of the people who started it, and their tenacity in hanging on to those assumptions. I imagine that’s the case everywhere, to some extent. But the Austin ‘occupation’ was started by some neo-hippies whose unorthodox notion of horizontalidad involves establishing close communication with the police and city government, and whose equally unorthodox notion of nonviolent civil disobedience involves working entirely within the law. This was made clear to everyone from the beginning. I stuck with it in the hope that leadership would broaden. And it has, but not without effort.

The first day set the tone — it was, essentially, a block party on City Hall, albeit an explicitly politicized one. The atmosphere was carnivalesque in just the customary Austin way: bizarre forms of personal expression, anti-authoritarian populism, weird conspiracy theories, inked-up hipsters, peace, love, and drum circles. Somewhere around 1,000 or more people showed up for the General Assembly. Ron Paulites gave a strong showing, but the only conspicuously absent groups were advocates for mainstream candidates — I think it was the second day I saw one lonely soul wearing an Obama 2012 T-shirt and carrying a clipboard. What finally won me over about that day was the ease of political discussion, even with ideological opponents, without an immediate breakdown. I ran a workshop on the 2008 debt crisis that even got the libertarian to take a Marxist analysis seriously (the really interesting thing here for me was that all 10 or so of the twenty-something white kids agreed on my Brennerian interpretation of what happened and why — the sticking point was the definition of capitalism).

Since the ‘occupation’ zone is a public space, it’s a perfectly legal spot on which to assemble. The catch is that Austin city ordinance does not permit sleeping overnight or camping on city property. The underlying social consequence is of course that (like is typical in the U.S.) it’s illegal to be homeless. Coinciding with the first day of Occupy Austin was an attempted illegal ‘tent city’ across the river, organized by homeless activists and advocates. Their declaration of solidarity seemed to take the Occupy organizers off guard, and who eventually offered a limp non-response on the Facebook community wall. While we were partying that afternoon, the tent city was blocked by police. Some anarchists put up a tent in front of City Hall as an act of solidarity. It was almost torn down that night, but the crowd insisted otherwise and the police relented, letting the symbol stand as long as we didn’t put up any more. After much debate, this prompted another limp official statement at the next day’s General Assembly (which I did not attend), posted online as “We don’t necessarily want to break the law, but we respect the tent city’s right to civil disobedience and stand in solidarity with them.” I believe this was modified (without being edited in the online minutes) to “We support Tent City’s right to Civil Disobedience, we stand in solidarity with them, but the members of Occupy Austin do not necessarily want to break the law, and therefore wish to remain separate from that movement.” Both versions manage only to cancel out their own attempts at content.

The next day, I happened to be sitting near the same group of young anarchists, discussing the tent city with the emerging celebrity anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street organizer David Graeber, when they started putting up another one next to the first. Being already disgusted with the GA’s non-stance and not thinking any of this was especially radical, I helped them do it. Almost immediately, we had people come up to “peacefully remind” us that what we were doing was illegal (in violation of a park ordinance, not even a misdemeanor) and that we were “violating consensus.” A crowd was forming around us, getting angrier and angrier as we incompetently struggled to erect the tent against the heavy wind that kept blowing it over. A GA was going on at the same time, and quickly divided over the tent. Some were permitted to commandeer the mic and incite the crowd against us. A group started chanting things like “WE WANT TO BE SAFE” and “TAKE DOWN THE TENT.” Meanwhile groups of police placidly strolled around and through the space, with no acknowledgement of the principled stand being taken by their staunch defenders. A middle-aged woman, who earlier had been confiscating signs with curse words on them, loudly demanded we take the tent down. When we didn’t she went off to get the police and it took several people to talk her down. While someone who actually knew how to assemble tents helped us, another boomer in a cowboy hat started taking it down. When we rushed to stop him he muscled through us, saying, “I’m a combat veteran and this tent is coming down.” Again, a group of peacekeepers were forced to corral him.

With the tent finally up, we had a heated debate with one of the original moderators — let’s call him M — and some of his supporters. They reiterated the importance of working through legal channels, the dangers of risking “the entire movement” and “other people’s personal safety” for “one stupid tent.” David tried to explain to them that presuming and creating hierarchies within oppositional movements by appearing to grant them legitimacy was a police tactic to force an elite to feel ‘responsible’ for everyone else, and that the only personal safety threatened was our own, by the other occupiers. They said we had jeopardized their decision to petition city council for a special permit to let us camp overnight. They threw out fantastic scenarios involving riot cops dispersing the entire group, of heroic occupiers, acting out of solidarity alone, throwing themselves before police nightsticks to protect a tent they didn’t even support. They defended the police, or as they referred to them, “peace officers”: “they’re the 99% too,” “they facilitated our march to Bank of America.” We asked M about his political convictions and if he thought the Occupy Austin GA had the authority to quash dissent. “I have radical thoughts,” he assured us, “but we have to respect the consensus process. And anyway, we’re really only disagreeing on timing. Which is sort of arbitrary, isn’t it?” I asked him if he was not permitting dissent in theory but not in practice, and insisted on the importance of nonviolent civil disobedience. His reply stunned me into silence. “What was MLK fighting against?” he asked me. “A lot of the same things we are, but let’s say primarily racial oppression,” I said. “And that’s still here, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s why we have to take the fight to the next level!”

At that point David ran off to do an interview with Al Jazeera and what was left of the conversation died back down. That night, the second tent was taken down by a bipartisan team of police and occupiers.

By the third day, it was clear the ‘occupation’ was off balance. After another discussion circle (probably the best organized thing so far) I brought up the tent city debacle and how people felt about civil disobedience in general at that night’s GA. We had just come off a successful bid to incorporate a solidarity statement with indigenous people’s struggles thanks to the participation of what seemed like our first ‘real’ activists, and emotions were already high. Though most seemed to agree with nonviolent direct action and a diversity of tactics within those bounds, the whole thing degenerated due to the moderator staff’s inexperience and overaggressive bid for control of the debate.

I dwell on this incident at such length because, unfortunately, it was the most significant event to occur over the weekend aside from the heavily managed Bank of America march. That and several non-starter attempts to establish basic principles, demands, etc. While I’m sure I made clear my fundamental ideological disagreement with Occupy Austin’s self-appointed ‘steering committee,’ I don’t think it would have mattered as much had we been a little more like Occupy L.A. That operation seems just as in love with the police as ours (oddly enough), receiving official support from the mayor and City Council. The only arrests attributed to Occupy L.A. were quickly disclaimed. However, they also seem to be much more effective organizers, making alliances with major unions (AFL-CIO) and progressive orgs. If we were visibly moving toward those goals, we probably wouldn’t have as much time to dwell on institutional compromises, nor the sense that they’re being engineered by a cadre of neoliberal hippies behind our backs (does anyone know if other Occupy groups require that all core value proposals be funneled through a Mission Committee?).

The absurdity of the whole thing highlights an important difference of opinion across the Occupy movement: is it an institution unto itself, with its own distinct goals and the right to exclude those which aren’t deemed ‘universal’ or ‘inclusive’ enough? Or is it a resource, a clearinghouse of sorts, through which differently privileged, differently oppressed groups of people can provide mutual aid? Is it a proto-state, or an open call for help? The former would be a response to media and institutional pressure to be ‘on message.’ Pressure from above. The latter would be a response to pressure from below.

Yesterday, the same community activists who pushed for indigenous solidarity successfully helped organized an Indigenous People’s Day March for this afternoon, against the worries of the usual crew of white middle class End the Fed types that the movement is getting “hijacked” by “personal interests.” As a concession, we’re stopping at JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America on the way. There weren’t as many people last night as I would have liked, but I think amidst the chaos and abjection some people are changing their minds.

Preparation

Attending planning meetings, preparing for tomorrow when Occupy Austin is to commence. In addition to posting about it here I may be helping out with video and running a discussion group on the 2008 financial crisis.

The website finally has General Assembly minutes and blogs – this one on Tuesday’s meeting I found ecapsulates both the good and bad things going on. What it seems like people are figuring out is that General Assemblies are good for deciding on actions and points of procedure but are terrible at discussion (which it forces into theatre or the shadows, it seems like). They are also figuring out that moderators have kind of a lot of power — the new rule to expand the moderator pool is a step forward. I’m nervous about tomorrow’s General Assembly because like the author of the post I don’t think we have any clue how to deal with the volume.

I still don’t care about ideological differences at the occupation; our individual opinions are, at this early stage, unimportant (though we do now have demands). More important just to show up and stand together. There are some currents in Occupy Austin I’ve noticed that may undermine this goal. Not differing opinions — even the noisy Ron Paul libertarians are pretty well neutralized by the effects of the direct democracy process. It’s difficult without devoting lots and lots of time for any individual to change anyone’s mind. Instead I mean how eager the most visible participants seem to be to collaborate with the police, and the automatic acceptance of the media’s view of Occupy Wall Streeters and members of other popular social movements — us — ourselves — as always on the brink of ‘violence,’ when it is always the police who provoke and respond the most brutally. I spoke with one woman who eagerly described her plan to create a ‘nonviolence team’ to surround and isolate anyone who seemed violent. Possibly she would also go as far as advocating physical restraint, but I couldn’t get a straight answer. I don’t expect anything that provocative to go down tomorrow and certainly favor nonviolence, but there was something really disturbing about this conception of readiness as self-policing. Why not surround violent cops instead?

I can understand both tendencies in two different ways: one sympathetic — fear of police reprisal is nothing to sneer at — and the other perhaps a bit arrogant — of course this is what we should expect from Americans and their revulsion at the very idea of politics or of confrontation with superior force. They — we — respond with cowardice, overreaction, self-policing, and, yes, maybe an insignificant minority respond with adolescent adventurism.

Here are the consequences: the whole thing was planned in contact with the police and City Hall, and the organizers who made those contacts were so emphatic that we follow the law and not be ‘violent’ that this was taken as consensus without (to my knowledge) going through any process. No honest discussion that might unpack the term ‘violence’ and come up with a definition that reflects our values, instead of guessing at the inconsistent application by police and media so we can apply it to ourselves, is likely to happen. The issue of police collaboration and legality didn’t come under open discussion until last night’s toss-up over the proposed ‘police liaison’; it was just assumed that of course we were going to follow the law. And that basically means no marching, though we also haven’t discussed that UPDATE (it turns out maybe this was discussed and I missed it — we don’t have permits though so maybe we also decided not to care about those laws?). Not discussing it because we assume that ‘of course we’re all going to follow the law’ just opens the field for breakaway groups to lead marches without any deliberation, irresponsibly opening themselves and others to police repression. We don’t even have an action or tactical committee. Finally, these assumptions meant that ‘we’ refused to even discuss a declaration of solidarity with the simultaneous “Tent City” initiative, which actually is planning to defy the police by sleeping overnight.

Instead of solidarity with those who choose to disobey the law, we seem to have decided — without really deciding — to look the other way. This is very much in line with the class prejudices of what looks to me like the majority of the participants: white, middle class, you know the drill. But let’s not be determinists. All one has to do is turn on the Twitter to see that the police don’t need any provocation to respond with brutal violence, no matter how polite we are and no matter how well we police our own dissent.

While I am worried about the consequences of these nondecisions, I’m still excited for tomorrow, and eager to see what comes out of this.

Though if Alex Jones shows up I’m going to throw community food.

Occupy Everything

I went to the first organizational meeting for Occupy Austin on Thursday, and will hopefully be able to make it to one or two more before the 6th when we all head for the City Hall building downtown. I’m posting a few observations from my experience so far.

- You’ve already heard this, but there were lots of people: the official count was 500; I don’t know how there could have been more than 300, but either way, impressive. Numbers at successive meetings (so I hear) have been much less but hovering around 100 seems pretty good to me.

- The crowd seemed to be a similar mix of people to the early stages of Occupy Wall Street. Mostly white, pretty evenly gender balanced, ‘middle class’ (whatever that means these days), youngish, with strong minorities of anarchist punks, community organizers, college students, social workers, media types, and hippies. But there were enough middle-aged people and people who looked employed to keep the group from feeling marginal. Though of course at this point we still are,

- Politically the group seemed (I stress this is just an impression from watching people self-identify) less left-oriented than Occupy Wall Street, which makes sense for a few reasons: we have less of an obvious target, the initial organizers were very insistent on non-partisanship, and we’re in Austin, which has a reputation for a vague ‘leftishness’ that conceals quite a few run-of-the-mill, Adam Smith fetishist libertarians. And there is no left in America. The inevitable Ron Paul rep gave his stump speech (no one advocated socialism or even anti-capitalism), and we even got trolled by a woman who identified herself with “Don’t Occupy Austin,” who said some nonsense about Anonymous and “supporting the USA instead.” To the group’s credit, both of these people were treated with a patronizing smile and nod, and didn’t manage to derail anything.

- I think this lack of political cohesion matters as little as the lack of clear demands. There was a lot of debate about whether or not to have demands that went on for way too long and, I think, missed the point. That is, I would prefer greater cohesion and a set of clear demands, but we are a people in love with bullshit, and until we have a real presence on the street, until we have felt the pressures of organizing and of holding space, ‘political debate’ is pretty meaningless.

- The decisive importance of action currently underwrites but will soon trump the depoliticizing rhetoric of nonpartisanship, political neutrality, etc. that some are using to ward off internal division. For example, a lot of people talked about peace and love, empathy for the police, and ‘we’re all in this together.’ All of this is very ‘Austin’ and I have no problem with drum circles either. But the whole point of this movement is that America really doesn’t stand together, that it’s the job of police to oppress us, that the wealthiest elite are openly cutting more and more people out of the social contract. Being together on the street in solidarity with the Occupy movement is forcing these facts out into the open, no matter what anyone says.

- The differences between the Occupiers will have to shake out at some point, but those differences are without significance until after we have done something together. This includes all the stupid worrying about appearing ‘respectable.’ The Occupiers must appear as the majority. The majority is simply ‘the 99%,’ or everyone who is not a plutocrat, who has been deprived of political agency, social support, and economic wealth. Whether or not we succeed in being the majority depends on who joins, not what they look like. This is about our power, no more and no less.

- If Occupy Together fails to attract people of color, the working class, and the poor, then we will have failed to be the majority. Not much seems to be getting done on this front in Austin, despite the presence of really good, POC-heavy anti-death penalty and prison complex groups.

- Occupy Austin’s organization still isn’t even at the level of Occupy Boston. Must find out why the website is still totally uninformative. A Facebook page is not a valid substitute (and no one posts timetables).

- This whole thing still seems silly and naive to me, especially non-Wall Street efforts like ours. But we’re going to do it anyway, if only just to see what happens.

Hopefully more later.

Fantastic Fest

Austin’s Fantastic Fest is the largest genre festival in North America, apotheosis of the mainstream clout “geek” or “fan culture” has been building since the ’90s. It shares the sense of cinematic utopia with other international film festivals, a genuinely diverse collection of movies populated by adventurous audiences, the comforting (and misleading) sense of an alternative to Hollywood instead of a supplement. But its difference is obvious, and not just in the programming, which draws on a pretty liberal definition of ‘fantastic’ and ‘genre,’ even as film culture itself moves ever closer to ‘nobrow’: it is not all that shocking when established auteur Lars von Trier, whose reputation is based in part on a gothic TV miniseries (Kingdom Hospital), does horror (Antichrist) or now science fiction (Melancholia). No, the difference is clearest in the ‘extras,’ the celebrity boxing matches and superhero costume parties, and the flavor of interaction between attendees — fans — and filmmakers and fans and each other. These interactions are structured by the assumption that film is primarily entertainment, and everyone is there to satisfy shared fetishes, often perverse or trivial ones, not to achieve mainstream cultural relevance. If elitism is prideful participation in some elevated thing that others should share but are too dumb, then geek/fan culture is about pride in the terminally marginal. The boundary between the two has been disintegrating for some time (in my generation producing mutants like the post-bloggers at zero books), but it’s stable enough to be recognizable, for people to still think and speak as if they were one or the other. The international filmmakers not accustomed to encountering fans instead of cinephiles, i.e. Michael Roskam of Bullhead, were taken off guard at first but seemed hooked by the end (by the third screening he was savvy enough to compare his film’s protagonist to Batman – “You’ve spoiled me for the art-house circuit,” he said, “and that’s a good thing”). There’s probably little more gratfying for a filmmaker than meeting an audience that not only passionately loves you just for being there but today is a serious tastemaker.

The following are my notes on the films I saw that had something worth noticing, good or bad.

Juan of the Dead (Alejandro Brugués, Cuba)

Thankfully Alejandro Brugués second feature isn’t limited to its novelty value as the “first Cuban horror/zombie movie.” Nor is it the cheap knockoff of Shaun of the Dead its title suggests, though they start from a similar place – zombies who allegorize the worst tendencies of their societies (basically conformity) take over, prompting a small group of slackers to find themselves by killing them. There’s an amusing running gag where the zombies keep getting mistaken for C.I.A.-sponsored dissidents. References to Cuban history are littered throughout, the biggest being the image of hundreds of Cubans attempting another great exodus from the island (presumably to the U.S.), some dragged to their deaths by underwater zombies. Here we have a different angle on the post-Soviet ‘end of history’ — a nation doomed to re-experience its war with the U.S. in increasingly absurd ways (in the Q&A Brugués revealed that a scene where ninja stars are used to dispatch zombies is based on an actual public lecture on preparing for Yankee invasion), stumbling through an uninspiring, futureless life (“It looks normal” is all one character can say upon seeing her neighborhood post-zombification). Brugués talked about the effects of the Special Period on Cuban society as an influence on the film, but it seemed odd to me, in 2011, to hold the U.S. up as every Cuban’s (slightly taboo) dream of escape — isn’t the American unemployment and poverty rate many times greater than Cuba’s? Though that dream is sympathized with throughout (and meekly affirmed at the end), it is never treated as realistic, nor as authentic. The only thing that really mars the film is its constant, vicious homophobia. I thought Michael Bay was bad.

Bullhead (Michel Roskam, Belgium)

This one beat the Dardenne brothers (snubbed again – the judges must know they’ll never win) for Belgium’s official entry for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. Aside from being a first film that puts anyone else’s first film to shame, its treatment of masculinity is interestingly literal. Nominally a gangster noir (the justification for including it, I guess), Bullhead is a character study of cattle farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille, who was castrated with a rock as a child and became addicted to testosterone supplements. He is also part of Belgium’s locally infamous “hormone mafia,” a criminal network that traffics in the kinds of chemical enhancements that we take for granted in US livestock but happen to be illegal in the EU. Jacky’s troubled relation to his own masculinity is a bit Cronenbergian (before he went all conceptual in the ’00s) in the way it is reduced to a physico-chemical substance addiction, a hot commodity. His physical castration and physical juicing make a Freudian analysis irrelevant; Freud’s ‘unconscious’ themes are Jacky’s daily thoughts. Roskam described Matthias Schoenaerts’s performance as guided by breaking down rather than building up a psychology, a character of barely-concealed animalistic urges and instincts.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, Canada)

I count this one along with House of the Devil and Drive as a recent subclass of ’80s nostalgia film. House poses as an artifact, a trompe l’oeil early ’80s babysitter movie; Drive is all arch irony, unmotivated stylistic and musical borrowings for a story set in the present. BtBR tries to do what you’re not supposed to and explicitly historicizes its own fetish — 1983 is the date that opens the film and 1966 marks the flashback (Christian Thorne has an interesting take on Body Double as a pomo historicist film). Drawing on a nonspecific, half-remembered mélange of ’80s sci-fi TV and VHS cover paintings, BtBR recreates the ’80s as a gothicized remnant of ’60s utopianism. The Arboria Institute was devoted to the improvement of human life; now it is just a shell, Dr. Arborea near-mummified in the basement, his former protégé wiling away the hours tormenting their most promising subject, a preteen with psychic powers (?). ’80s futurism was indeed mostly dystopian, which at first glance makes it an odd object for nostalgia. But I don’t pick up any longing for happier times from most of these odd throwbacks (pop music is different). Instead it seems to be a way to represent contemporary feelings of dread and alienation, which has so far proved close to impossible to achieve with contemporary materials. The content of commodity culture hasn’t advanced much since then, so the complexes of today are easily projected onto that decade’s objects. And more usefully: in the networked 21st century, everyone could be consuming anything, everyone shares and borrows from everything, but nothing is held in common; an underground ’80s is the closest thing artists of a certain age have to a set of shared cultural references outside of infantilizing interface menus (the ’90s are coming back in as Gen Y grows up, but I have no idea how anyone is going to reconstruct the 100% recycled ’00s into anything coherent). And indeed, one thing all three films share is a fixation on ‘atmosphere’ that trumps narrative momentum. BtBR is the most extreme in this regard: the production design and the analog synth soundtrack are the real stars, plot is put off until the perfunctory and farcical final act. It’s a pure fetishist’s movie, with almost no concession to anyone else. I got off on it, but the whole thing bears an (unintentional?) resemblance to an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Carré Blanc (Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, France)

Another debut film, this future dystopian take on corporate life presents that world as a series of sadistic psychology experiments. A man is ordered to give himself an electric shock for as long as he can endure it; a woman is ordered to remain within a small ring on the floor while her interviewer hits her over the head with a bamboo stick. Their purpose is to separate the strong from the weak, so that the weak can be processed as food for the strong. The funniest part of the film is how everyone maintains the enforced attitude of corporate civility even in the most abject and humiliating situations (the closest thing to ‘villains’ – a pack of testosterone-laden, ultraviolence-dispensing suits – don’t last long). All the mind games are ostensibly are to demonstrate the fairness of this post-resource population control scheme. Philippe, the Obama lookalike protagonist (almost everyone else in the film is white), is repeatedly told that his high rank is “proof the system works.” He and his boss cluck over the ‘obvious’ solutions to the games that no one else picks up on — the small ring on the floor can itself be moved, for example, and the bamboo stick avoided. But we see how the demand to constantly prove loyalty to the regime destroys creative thought, making selection for the games a virtual death sentence, albeit a self-justifying one (to the administrators, the players ‘choose’ to destroy themselves). This is a world where the unfit are invisible because they are consumed, everything has been consumed, where there is nothing but Brutalist concrete and white people in suits. We see the population numbers slip into decline, and a big part of the plot is Philippe’s passive refusal to reproduce out of despair and self-loathing — the ’sustainability’ plan is not sustainable. Léonetti imagines what would be left of capitalist society after the market runs out of resources and comes up with something between George Orwell and Michel Foucault.*

Melancholia (Lars von Trier, Denmark)

I hated Antichrist, heard this was similar, and so only went because nothing else in its time slot seemed worth it. One common criticism of both films I don’t agree with though is that the genre elements are gimmicks or ‘stunts.’ That’s just realist snobbery, a depressing thing to find in the most spectacular visual medium ever but there it is. The problem with Antichrist wasn’t that it was a horror movie (with over-the-top gore, talking animals, etc.), but that it was a bad horror movie; its allegorical premise was stupid and wasn’t carried off in an inventive or even competent way. Melancholia is almost as thin in terms of character and just as thematically extravagant — it juxtaposes a rich white woman’s clinical depression to Earth’s apocalyptic collision with a larger planet named ‘Melancholia’ — but is much better executed. It’s actually a good companion piece to Tree of Life, both lavishly photographed, elliptically edited, epic-length films linking a realist drama about ‘white people problems’ — and Americans, no less — to the movements of the cosmos. Von Trier takes the added step (whether forward or backward I leave to the reader) of putting both events on the same diegetic plane: it’s a science fiction film in a way Tree of Life was not. The film is split into two halves, each focusing on one of two sisters. The first half, on the depressed Justine (Kirsten Dunst), shows her ruining her expensive wedding to her boss’s son, a powerful ad executive, and in style hearkens back to Von Trier’s ‘Golden Heart’ melodramas. The second half focuses on family woman Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who helps Justine pick up the pieces as Melancholia barrels toward them. The parallelisms are pretty obvious: two parts, two sisters, two planets. Life vs. death. That death gets the stronger case should be no surprise, though I found the end much more satisfying than Tree of Life‘s hokey walk on the beach, and really not that cynical. The relation to more conventional science fiction apocalypses is interesting — SF usually uses the moment of The End to expand its scope to society as a whole (it’s only afterward that stories in this genre return to the personal), while Melancholia rather cheekily uses it as an opportunity to heighten an already heightened melodrama. It sometimes seems anti-science fiction, as in the way it shamelessly indulges the cliché of the male rational optimist who turns out to be totally wrong (take that, climate change). But I think a better way of putting it would be to say it embraces what in most SF figures as weak responses to crisis that have to be overcome in the name of action: emotional withdrawal, cynicism about the value of ‘life’ in the abstract, putting the family unit and social convention over broader social agency, etc., and genders them female. Thematically similar to Antichrist, yes, but with a better integrated, less emotionally distancing use of kitsch. Despite the overall more careful construction, Melancholia feels rawer, less defensive.

One day I want to write something on the proximity Malick’s and Von Trier’s films share with advertising, but that will have to wait.

*the whole film could be read as a parody of Foucault, come to think of it — the end of capitalism due to resource depletion provides the only conditions under which his analysis of biopower could be universally accurate: totalitarian liberalism.

Another ponderable from ‘Debt’

“Within human economies, motives are assumed to be complex. When a lord gives a gift to a retainer, there is no reason to doubt that it is inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if it is also a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an act of magnificence meant to remind everyone else that he is great and the retainer small. There is no sense of contradiction here. Similarly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on such matters is a major form of daily entertainment. What’s missing, though, is any sense that the most selfish (‘self-interested’) motive is necessarily the real one: those speculating on hidden motives are just as likely to assume that someone is secretly trying to help a friend or harm an enemy as to acquire some advantage for him- or herself. Neither is any of this likely to have changed much in the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as much dependent on assessments of its issuer’s character as on his disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride, etc. could never be completely set aside.

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like ‘profit’ and ‘advantage’ — and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies. If the underlying assumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it’s no coincidence — but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when ‘cutthroat competition’ often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear.

…

The Confucian ideal of ren, of humane benevolence, was basically just a more complete inversion of profit-seeking calculation than Mo Di’s universal love; the main difference was that the Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself, preferring what might almost be called an art of decency. Taoists were later to take this even further with their embrace of intuition and spontaneity. All were so many attempts to provide a mirror image of market logic. Still, a mirror image is, ultimately, just that: the same thing, only backwards. Before long we end up with an endless maze of paired opposites — egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, calculation versus spontaneity — none of which could ever have been imagined except by someone starting out from pure, calculating, self-interested market transactions.”

– David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (238-9)

Debt, Speculation, Apocalypse

Immanuel Wallerstein likes to point out that the French Revolution introduced several profoundly new ideas in politics — ideas which, fifty years before the revolution, the vast majority of educated Europeans would have written off as crazy, but which, fifty years afterward, just about anyone felt they had to at least pretend they thought were true. The first is that social change is inevitable and desirable: that the natural direction of history is for civilization to gradually improve. The second is that the appropriate agent to manage such change is the government. The third is that the government gains its legitimacy from an entity called “the people.” It’s easy to see how the very idea of a national debt — a promise of continual future improvement (at the very least, five percent annual improvement) made by government to people — might itself have played a role in inspiring such a revolutionary new perspective. Yet at the same time, when one looks at what men like Mirabeau, Voltaire, Diderot, Siéyes — the philosophes who first proposed the notion of what we now call “civilization” — were actually arguing about in the years immediately leading up to the revolution, it was even more about the danger of apocalyptic catastrophe, of the prospect of civilization as they knew it being destroyed by default and economic collapse.

Part of the problem was the obvious one: the national debt is, first, born of war; second, it is not owed to all the people equally, but above all to capitalists — and in France at that time, “capitalist” meant, specifically, “those who held pieces of the national debt.” The more democratically inclined felt that the entire situation was opprobrious. “The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, around this same time, “has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.” Most Enlightenment thinkers feared that it promised even worse. Intrinsic to the new, “modern” notion of impersonal debt, after all, was the possibility of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, at that time, was indeed something of a personal apocalypse: it meant prison, the dissiolution of one’s estate; for the least fortunate, it meant torture, starvation, and death. What national bankruptcy would mean, at that point in history, nobody knew. There were simply no precedents. Yet as nations fought greater and bloodier wars, and their debts escalated geometrically, default began to appear unavoidable. Abbe Sieyès first put forward his great scheme for representative government, for instance, primarily as a way of reforming the national finances, to fend off the inevitable catastrophe. And when it happened, what would it look like? Would the money become worthless? Would military regimes seize power, regiems across Europe be likewise forced to default and fall like dominos, plunging the continent into endless barbarism, darkness, and war? Many were already anticipating the prospect of the Terror long before the revolution itself.

It’s a strange story because we are used to thinking of the Enlightenment as the dawn of a unique phase of human optimism, borne on assumptions that the advance of science and human knowledge would inevitably make life wiser, safer, and better for everyone — a naïve faith said to have peaked in the Fabian socialism of the 1890s, only to be annihilated in the trenches of World War I. In fact, even the Victorians were haunted by the dangers of degradation and decline. Most of all, Victorians shared the near-universal assumption that capitalism itself would not be around forever. Insurrection seemed imminent. Many Victorian capitalists operated under the sincere belief that they might, at any moment, find themselves hanging from trees. In Chicago, for instance, a friend once took me on a drive down a beautiful old street, full of mansions from the 1870s: the reason, he explained, that it looked like that, was that most of Chicago’s rich industrialists of the time were so convinced that the revolution was imminent that they collectively relocated along the road that led to the nearest military base. Almost none of the great theorists of capitalism, from anywhere on the political spectrum, from Marx to Weber, to Schumpeter, to von Mises, felt that capitalism was likely to be around for more than another generation or two at the most.

One could go further: the moment that the fear of imminent social revolution no longer seemed plausible, by the end of World War II, we were immediately presented with the specter of nuclear holocaust. Then, when that no longer seemed plausible, we discovered global warming. This is not to say that these threats were not, and are not, real. Yet it does seem strange that capitalism feels the constant need to imagine, or to actually manufacture, the means of its own imminent extinction. It’s in dramatic contrast to the behavior of the leaders of socialist regimes, from Cuba to Albania, who, when they came to power, immediately began acting as if their system would be around forever — ironically enough, considering they in fact turned out to be something of an historical blip.

Perhaps the reason is because what was true in 1710 is still true. Presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalism — or anyway, financial capitalism — simply explodes. Because if there’s no end to it, there’s absolutely no reason not to generate credit — that is, future money, indefinitely. Recent events would certainly seem to confirm this. The period leading up to 2008 was one in which many began to believe that capitalism really was going to be around forever; at the very least, no one seemed any longer to be able to imagine an alternative. The immediate effect was a series of increasingly reckless bubbles that brought the whole apparatus crashing down.

– David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (359-60)

Man Hunt

Fritz Lang’s 1941 film Man Hunt (based on a novel with just as unintentionally homoerotic a title, Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household, which I haven’t read) is structured around an interesting conceit: just before WWII, a thrillseeking British aristocrat (Alan Thorndike, played by the Canadian Walter Pigeon) is caught aiming a rifle at Hitler in what he claims was a “sport stalking,” basically throwing the fish back in. He’s then constantly pursued for the rest of the movie by the Gestapo in order to get him to sign a confession that he both a) really intended to kill Hitler and b) did it with the full knowledge of the British government, creating a pretext for war. Why Germany would want to go to war with Britain in 1938 is anyone’s guess, but that’s beside the point. By the end of the film, Gestapo agent Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders, the great English Nazi), before getting an arrow in the neck, has convinced Thorndike that he unconsciously desired Hitler’s death but fails to get him to subordinate that desire to a nation state. Since we’ve seen Thorndike’s own aristo father imply that England would gladly give him up for dead to appease the Führer, it’s easy to understand why.

But the resistance to nationalism goes deeper. Thorndike is an individualist, a free spirit, able to treat his social class — that most typically English of classes, landed gentry — as merely a source of income. I don’t know the circumstances behind the casting choices, but it’s entirely fitting that the lead actor be a Canadian with no interest in sounding English, the love interest, a working-class Londoner, played by an American (Joan Bennett — hearing Jersey attempt Cockney is quite an experience), and the heavy an Englishman with fluent German. Having heard Sanders do a decent enough German accent in other films, I can only assume that Lang told him to drop it for this role, and anyway the incongruities are backed up by the plot: the name Quive-Smith is an odd hybrid that doesn’t seem to have much to do with German, he is suspiciously described at one point as “too perfectly English”; Thorndike’s accent is (weakly) explained by the amount of time he spends “at his house in Canada,” etc. All of which adds an extra layer of irony to the following bit of dialogue between them. I’ll include the whole scene as it’s the only one I could find on YouTube; the part I transcribed occurs around 4:30:

Quive-Smith: “Your conversation fascinates me, Thorndike. But this softness in your nature with regard to the ultimate purpose of firearms betrays the weakness, the decadence, not only of yourself but of your entire race. Yes, you’re symbolic of the English race.

Thorndike: “I’m beginning to think that you’re symbolic of yours!”

The film’s amusing habit of highlighting the distance between the actors, the characters, and the national cultures they’re supposed to represent foregrounds the instability of any connection between signifier and state-fiction, and the absurdity of insisting on them. That this absurdity is linked to war is the film’s moral argument. Which can be a bit hard to reconcile with the fact that its one utopian projection is inextricable from violence. We’re told that Thorndike is an apolitical pacifist. This claim is undercut early on — after squeezing an empty trigger on Hitler, we see him put a bullet into the chamber and aim the rifle again before he’s caught — but it is not exactly refuted. In the end he confesses to wanting to carry out the assassination, not for England but for “humanity,” a concept that, like his pacifism, he derives from his enlarged sense of self, his abhorrence of anyone else trying to “play God.” If only he had figured this out straightaway, he could have saved the world. And indeed the film ends with him joining the military, solely in order to go rogue as soon as he’s behind enemy lines and “fulfill his destiny” by killing Hitler all by himself.

To get any idea of how this might have played at the time of the film’s release, months before the U.S. entered the war, we’d have to imagine Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming propaganda movie about killing Bin Laden coming out a few months after 9/11. But that wouldn’t be right either, because Man Hunt was an American studio film, adapted from an English novel published before the war, directed by a Austrian Jewish refugee, set in England from just before the invasion of Poland to just after the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and released shortly thereafter. It was enough to cause problems with American censors who saw it as anti-German — the US was of course still neutral. Man Hunt is the only anti-nationalist war propaganda movie I can think of without lasers, dragons, or zombies, made in the name of an international alliance that had not yet become the Allies (so the Bigelow analogy would only work if the movie was made in China, set in New York, and directed by an Arab Jew). In Thorndike, frontier toughness (he’s a hunter who kills Quive-Smith with a makeshift bow and arrow), gentlemanly charm, and pacifistic morality come together under the banner of upright Anglo-American individualism, to create a fantasy that 60 years later has all but become NATO foreign policy. Post-Bin Laden, we’re living in Man Hunt‘s utopia.

But what if we resist the interpretation the film guides us toward, that of the lone badass driven by universal principles to stop wars, indifferent to the state that underwrites his adventures? To seize instead on that initial, almost anarchistic moment where Thornhill takes aim, shoots nothing, and packs up to go home, and read it against the teleology of the plot and his ‘unconscious’ utopian motives? It would be the nihilistic choice, true, the abandonment of all thought of a better world, but it would embrace everything great about the movie: its lightness, its sense of playful irony, the analogy it draws between serious ethical principles and the rules of a game — and a different kind of power, power as the mockery of power, seriousness as the mockery of seriousness.

Totality and Exhaustion

A few notes on two writers for whom the all-encompassing totality of the capitalist system is aligned with the exhaustion of culture, and how that problem is to be dealt with: Don DeLillo and Fredric Jameson.

Cosmopolis isn’t among Don DeLillo’s best for the same reason that it is the most useful for comprehending his work as a whole: it condenses all/most of the ‘standard’ DeLillo concerns into a slim précis that can be read (as I did) over the course of a plane ride. Eric Packer, its currency trading protagonist, is the kind of vapid, amoral übermensch in love with abstraction capitalist society encourages, a postmodernist par excellence. He is stalked by an assassin  as confused about his identity as was Lee Harvey Oswald in the earlier Libra. The chief difference between he and Packer is not ideological (the character’s anticapitalism is pretty swiftly revealed to be a hypocritical front), rather that it actually occurs to him to be troubled by his own vagueness. To reach the same point of personal reflection, Packer has to embark on an ironized voyage of self-discovery (he’s ostensibly out to get a haircut) which leads to the loss of his fortune as well as a great deal of emotional and physical pain and suffering. Self-dissolution figures as the only possible ‘solution’ to the problems of intense abstraction and meaninglessness, after his belief in an underlying order to the digital world of high finance he inhabits is proven false: he miscalculates the rise of the yen. Kinski, his ‘theorist,’ a Baudrillard parody and chief representative of this initial conviction, claims the anticapitalist rioters they encounter are merely effects of the market. Packer agrees with her until the spectacle of one such protester setting himself on fire: “What did this change? Everything, he thought. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror.” In DeLillo, suffering and impending death take on quasi-religious significance, delivering a shock that has the potential to shift the protagonist out of abstract capitalist consciousness toward awareness of self, a kind of negative enlightenment:

“But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn’t think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sses in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.”

It’s entirely the point that these details are so non-specific, such conventional markers of humanity. As evidence for his singular, irreducible reality, they could be anything; he simply has to recognize them as such, against those who might (for confused ideological reasons, the result of a weak self) wish to negate his being: assassins, terrorists, rioters, etc., and against the “cybercapitalist” technoculture that treats all selves as interchangeable bits of data. Defying them all is the self of the novel, the self shorn of all qualities, just the proprietary, organizing center for stories.

DeLillo is one of a long line of secular mystics in American literature. He uses fiction to give history’s contingent and meaningless events a mythic structure, a sense of totality that is not reducible to knowledge. The clunkiness of Cosmopolis‘s narrative movement (it’s closer to an outline than a novel, making it the perfect choice of DeLillo’s novels for the film adaptation it is about to receive) exposes the limitations of the overall approach. Is catastrophe, however vicarious and mediated by technology and irony, really the only serious response to existential dissatisfactions, are those dissatisfactions so universal as to deserve elevating over more immediate antagonisms, and is the attempt to do so in the name of the contemplative subject of the Angl0-European novel dissociable from whiteness, maleness, detachment, elitism? But depicting with such force the hysterical core of ‘late capitalist’ white male consciousness in terminal decline is one of DeLillo’s triumphs as a novelist, and maybe it’s too much to ask that he do something else.

I like to think of him as The Novel’s answer to Fredric Jameson (I’m referring to the novel more as a cultural institution than a type of text, supposed to be preserving or defending the legitimacy of something or other), though without providing the pedagogy and “cognitive mapping” that Jameson ultimately asks for. Jameson is interested in totality as an existential bond between knowledge, emotion, and action, and for him narrative can by and large no longer provide this. His theme, like Adorno’s, is the failure of culture to be what it’s supposed to have been at various points over the last 200 years: the sole remaining hope for achieved totality after the failures of religion, nationalism, (positive) ideology. Because “our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production,” then “at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment…and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively” (xii, Archaeologies of the Future). This is a valorization of criticism over its objects, of consciousness of failure over the failed attempt. Theory is necessary to excavate the submerged ‘utopian’ kernel in cultural product, and so theory takes the place of the novel. But today cultural criticism at all levels of sophistication is just as passé as any other cultural product. In the wake of thousands of scholarly articles and millions of blog posts about TV shows and their relationship to capitalism, one can detect a nostalgia for the period of so-called high theory, the sense that Baudrillard’s simulacra is a more exciting, more vital, more interesting vision of reality than anything possible today. The fashionably jaded don’t long for a period of greater authenticity — we don’t believe in it, assuming anyone ever did — but times when the lies were, or at least felt more interesting (maybe you had to be there). Here Jameson and DeLillo run into basically the same problems. It’s not about fiction vs. theory – they’re just another dialectical pair. The important split they both take for granted is between thought and action – that one can be meaningfully judged independently of the other, that one can compensate for the failure of the other. Recognizing this, one starts to understand the desperation of the desire for closure, the extraction of a closed world, however doomed and miserable, from ceaseless outward movement, any inevitable remainder to be referred to from afar as a sign of exhaustion. The world claimed by totality can only be comprehended, never known. Grasp of the whole presupposes a certain divine ignorance.