Ghost in the Wire

Well through no fault of my own, populism has actually been quite the issue of late, both in the blogosphere and beyond, and as I've already been posting about it in my review of Ernesto Laclau's latest book, I thought I'd at least think through some of the responses that are circulating in the blogospheric ether. At the risk of reducing just a bit, it seems to me that we can group some of the various responses into three major categories.

Category: Cores and Kernels, or why Class Stuggle is Cooler

Most pertinent to my interests and to my previous two posts on Laclau is the discussion of the recent conference at Birbeck College in London, a conference which revolved around the question "Is the Politics of Truth Still Thinkable?" I find this a terribly facile question, since the simple and obvious answer ("Umm, yes?") makes one wonder why it takes so many different contributors so much complicated positioning in order to confirm it. I don't want to short-change the various presentations, which you can listen to in full, as I think many of them are quite interesting, but I do think the question that serves as the conference's organizing theme lacks a certain sense of imagination. For those interested, IT has a fantastic review of the proceedings. For my purposes here, I'm going to focus on Zizek's offering, since Zizek is explicitly responding to Laclau's work on populism. For quotability reasons, let me excerpt something from K-Punk's fairly glowing review:

Populism, according to Laclau, is to be preferred to 'class struggle' because it does not posit a single, privileged agent or cause. Instead of a monomaniacal focus on the working class, populist uprisings can have at their core anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal (or any other) struggles.

I pause here only to note the introduction of the word "core," which takes a statement which might be a reasonable interpretation of Laclau's book (it wouldn't be my rendering, but it's fair enough) and transforms it into the grounds for an attack. Laclau never speaks of a core to a populist movement; rather, as I have explained previously, he argues that something that what Zizek (and his admirers) call a core is in fact a synecdochal arrangement through which one struggle comes to represent an aggregate of individual demands, thus transitioning into a populist demand. In the absence of this synecdochal consummation, there is no populism. Now it's perfectly correct to say that Laclau believes that class struggle isn't a privileged signifier, and it is also correct to say that he believe that class struggle by no means provides the most efficacious means of a movement, but it is a bit of a posturing to speak of this relationship in terms of a core, which implies an essence when Laclau ascribes none. We'll see why this is important as we follow K-Punk's review:

In the past few weeks, a discussion of populism has cropped up on a number of blogs, sometimes in response to other posts, sometimes in response to books or conferences, and other times as reflections without some obvious proximate cause. The variety and quality of those discussions hints at the very real potential that blogs have to better and advance academic conversation, especially in the humanities, and I'm glad to have participated in it. What follows is a roundup of the contributions.

Angela: Populism-Redux.

Bat @ Lenin's Tomb: Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers

Le Colonel Chabert: Hydra, Agency is Eeeevil; Populism and the Industry.

Infinite Thought: Is the Politics of Truth Still Thinkable?

Jared Woodard: Populists or Proletarians.

Jon (Posthegemonic Musings): anti-politics; substitution.

K-Punk: Left Hyperstition 1: The Fictions of Capital; Left Hyperstition 2: Be Unrealistic, Change What's Possible; The Beast that Won't Die.

Kenneth Rufo (Me): Sitting inside an empty airport; On Populist Reason; Gather Ye Plebs; Plebs, Attack!

Meaders @ Lenin's Tomb: The People's Populism.

I'f I'm missing any, please leave the links in comments and I'll elevate them to the main post.

Stanley "Tookie" Williams has been denied clemency.

There will come a time when the America to come, the America governed by our children's children, will look back at how desparately, how pathetically, this country held to the death penalty, even in the face of the most absurd miscarriages of justice, even during the execution of the very persons that proved that prison can work as an effective means of rehabilitation and retribution, even when holding on to the death penalty required an almost petulant and Herculean disregard for the morals of the world around us. That America will look on this one with disdain and shock, and most of all, sadness.

I want to offer at least one more entry into the populism debate before it dies. Whereas last time I tried to address the Zizek-inspired maneuver by which populism is rejected because of its supposedly reformist core, this time I want to address a different category of response, one at the opposite end of the spectrum, one that champions populism, not as a functional panacea, but as the inheritor and vehicle of Marxism.

Category: Populism as the Revenge of the Proletariat

A number of comments on populism - I'm thinking specifically of Bat's post at Lenin's Tomb, or to a lesser extent, Le Colonel Chabert's multiple posts in favor of populist movements - seemed to stress that populism must be aggressively supported, or maybe more accurately, must be aggressively defended against negative assessments. The theory appears to be that these negative assessments are in fact the pernicious means by which liberal democratic elites short-circuit the power of the people by demeaning the mechanisms by which people mobilize, or at least limiting those mechanisms in ways approved by the interests of the ruling parties. Bat goes so far as to say:

So: as crazy as it may sound, we have to side unflinchingly with populist movements and affirm their communist potential in the face of all this desperate mud-flinging by bien pensant neo-liberal ideologues. Only from this position, embedded in the movement, is it possible to make some political sense of Zizek's criticisms of Laclau-style populism. This is where the real task for political thought today lies: to transform reformist hysterical populism into a revolutionary proletarian subjectivity, a volonté générale (or generique, as Alain Badiou pertinently suggested). And it is only from within those movements that the potentials for such a transformation can be located, grasped and enacted.

This is just plain silly.

I think I'm going to coin two schools of media criticism/theory. They already exist, but like all good "schools," they lack a taxonomy. So here they are:

• New Mediatism: This is a theory that looks for the progress and/or disaster inherent in any and all new media, precisely because of their newness and because newness wouldn't come about if not in response to some deficiency in the oldness or nowness. Examples of new mediatism can be seen in the work of those who say things like "video games are totally different, totally new than those media that came before them" or who blame new elaborate special effects for both ruining movies and for leading to sudden increases in violent tendencies.
• Old Mediatism: This is a theory that attempts to thwart any notion that new media are responding to gaps or deficiencies in old media. New media are in fact new clothes on a very old emporer, and do many of the same things that old media do, and simply attempt to update them in order to tap into consumer patterns and make some coinage. Sure, some things are newer, and even better, but old mediatism prides itself on a willful nostalgia that refuses to really take any of those differences seriously, and instead attempts to reduce those differences to the point of insignificance.

There they are, two new schools of thinking, or at least two new labels for old thoughts. I expect to be cited.

I am constantly amazed by how impoverished is the discussion of victory in the war on terror. I don't just mean the very obvious discussion of what our supposedly inevitable victory will look like, a discussion thus far constituted by vague and insipid platitudes. We're told that this victory, our victory, will be at hand when freedom replaces fear, when democracy flourishes, when the terrorists have been eliminated as a threat (either through their death or incapacitation). We don't discuss how we'll know or measure any of those vague ascriptions and we don't spent much time or effort detailing the endgame by which these conditions will eventually obtain. And implicit within most of the discourse we do have on the subject is an assumption, one consistent with what Bush calls our "culture of life," that killing the terrorists and simultaneously preventing them from killing Americans is certainly the core of our anti-terror strategy and the best means we have of assessing whether we're winning.

But what of the terrorists' victory? What would it look like? How would we know if the terrorists are winning? Is it realistic to think that the terrorists measure success through merely the converse of the above, the successful killing of Americans and the survival of the terrorists? Given their celebration of suicide bombings, given their smaller numbers and distributed "cell" structure, and given much of the target selection thus far, it seems doubtful that this is the metric that Al Qaeda and its affiliates are using. Bush is right in saying that they do not follow a culture of life (and the disconnect between the West's biopolitics and the terrorists' celebration of death is, in fact, one of the reasons we have such difficulty responding, materially and rhetorically, to something like a suicide bombing), so why would we assume that their version of success would be measured by standards and metrics predicated on a culture they don't share?

Sure, their stated and purported goal is the destruction of America, the creation of a pan-Islamic theocratic order, and so on and so forth. But these are unrealistic goals, just as unrealistic as the elimination of terror itself (or even the total elimination of terrorism and/or terrorists), and so we should recognize that this goal, this telos, is not in and of itself synonymous or coterminous with what constitutes a terrorist victory. What if, instead of body counts and lives saved, the terrorists think of victories in the war on terror differently? Let me just quickly suggest two alternate possibilities, that of brand warfare and symbolic disruption. Brand Al Qaeda has done quite well for itself, in no small part because of the Bush administration's practice of lumping all terrorism under its auspices, in effect synecdochally elevating a small but effective terrorist group into the proper name of terror itself. Brand America, with its intelligence failures, its John Boltons, its stumbling diplomacy, has not flourished nearly as well.

And as for symbolic disruption? Well, with one attack on American soil - one! - Al Qaeda produced an America in which the executive willingly violates constitutional law on the basis of wartime necessity, maligns those who critiques or discusses this violation, tells the electorate that open debate on these issues aids our enemies, and who does all this only to find ardent support among party loyalists and media allies. With one attack, Al Qaeda supposedly declared themselves a new enemy, unlike any ever faced, and in doing so, changed substantively the symbolic charater of what makes America worthy of its name. What if this is exactly how they measure success, by charting the hysteria and the democratic collapse that followed the fall of the towers? What if, every time Bush declares that the world changed, Al Qaeda congratulates themselves, citing these declarations as proof of their succcess? What if they watch Bush defend secret laws and secret spying and the concomitant curtailment of the freedoms we are told the terrorists oppose, smile to each other and say to themselves, "we did that, we have won, we have remade America."

Let me make something clear: unconstitutional domestic surveillance isn't evidence of fascism in this country; the contortions that so many pundits and partisans go through to justify that surveillance is.