What the world needs now…
…is my take on k-punk’s take on lenin, Chabert, Jon the post-hegemon and others’ takes on each other’s takes on…damn, what was it now?…oh, yes: populism.
War of the Phantoms. Is populism itself a phantom, or a real phenomenon produced through the conjuration of phantoms, phantoms conjured by means of other phantoms? Spirit’s spirit spirits spirit…
Something very material about mass mobilisations, though. Thrilling, too, if that’s what thrills you (or what you thrill to). Marches and slogans – very much the SWP’s thing. A great bonus of this very busy, very public sort of acting-out is that it authorizes the activist’s self-shielding sneer: so, what’s your thing? Sitting at home doing nothing? No need, then, to produce a rationale for one’s own actions.
The rationale behind a slogan is, of course, that it mobilises others: it is like advertising in that respect, no-one will admit to being influenced by it personally but everybody will agree that it has an influence. Of course one knows, personally and individually, that the slogan one is chanting is simplistic, intellectually void, deliberately mendacious even; but it is valuable anyway, because it moves “people”, provides a focus for “their” activity. Likewise, the march is not the accumulation of the minutely meaningful actions of a great many individuals, since no one marcher is really doing anything worth doing by itself, but a mass event in which each individual participates for the sake of the others. It’s a little like staying together for the sake of the kids, except that there are no kids.
If this transitivity of affect has no ultimate object or resting place, then it is the function of populism to postulate a fictitious one: an auditor (whom one can accuse of never listening); an agent for whom the slogan (“Don’t bomb Viagrastan!”) would finally be meaningful, and whose actions would in turn have meaning. The problem, then, is not that “the people” believe in the agency of this auditor: it is that they (or those who seek to mobilise and incite them) do not believe in their own agency, entrusting it to a dispositif in which it is always either indefinitely deferred or finally captured by some authority figure who will exercise it on their behalf.
“What else can we do?” they say. What else can we do?
December 20th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Or in other words, they address the Big Other with hysterical demands that…
The ‘populist’ masses become revolutionary, then, when they realise that there is no big other and that
they are the agents of change.
Fair enough. One thing, however: is it necessary, humorous or in any way interesting to reduce the site
of enormous suffering to an object of laddish comedy just because you wish ironise about slogans?
December 20th, 2005 at 8:17 pm
“Don’t bomb Viagrastan” is a line from a song by Cathal Coughlan, the object of which is not at all “laddish” comedy.
The couplet from which it is taken is this: “Desire outstrips demand / don’t bomb Viagrastan”. “Viagra” here is presumably oil, or whatever else it is that the “first” world requires from the “third” in order to maintain it in the manner to which it has become accustomed.
The faux-slogan “don’t bomb Viagrastan” indicates the complicity of the protestor in the crime he protests: a crime committed, in spite of all protestation to the contrary, in the name of his desire.