Title:
Literary Counter Insurgency: Managing Dissent by Absorbing the
Counter Culture. (?)
Paper
Few would argue that many of the
cultural ideas and practices that were once perceived as subversive,
the once-alternative values produced by the counter cultures of the
sixties and seventies, have today become commonplace. Anti-capitalist
figures such as Montgomery Burns, Mr. Potter, Jabba the Hut, and
modern versions of Ebenezer Scrooge dominate social media, while
positive capitalist portrayals are not only scarce but presented
usually with subtle apologies or overt defenses. The newest Batman
film, for example, doesn't try so much to sell us on capitalism as to
scare us away from other possibilities. By some accounts it seems
that the counter culture has taken over. Once threatening figures of
resistance such as Martin Luther King and Malcom X are today
celebrated as cultural role models. The free-spirited adventurism and
willingness to try new things--to explore a communal subconscious
that puts ego and social identity at risk--behaviors and attitudes
that once excluded people from succeeding or even participating in
fundamental social institutions, have today become the flexible
skill-set that employers are actively looking for. Formerly radical
praxes such as Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed are
now almost cliche teaching methods of the state/market sponsored
educational system; while Augusto Boal's radical theater games, his
rehearsals for revolution, are commonly taught by corporations in
order to boost company morale and efficiency.
Nevertheless, in spite of the
preponderance of anti-capitalist media production, there seems to be
little evidence that capitalism is actually in trouble. To the
contrary, capitalism seems stronger than ever, but that isn’t to
say, obviously, that capitalism has won over our hearts and
minds—just, perhaps, a part of our minds, a part not overly
concerned with ideology or conscious decision-making. The
counter-culture, as Antonio Negri argues, may have in fact won the
battle but lost the war. What we see in modern culture today, Negri
argues, are the concessions made by capitalism in order to divert
more serious rebellions. Roberto Virno takes Negri's idea a step
further and suggests that the changes brought about by the counter
culture are today the new forces of Post-Fordist capitalist
production. It isn't just that anti-capitalist thoughts have become
absorbed and made non-threatening but that a specific type of
anti-capitalist mind-set is what saved and now drives the modern
capitalist agenda, that the counter-culture is today being harnessed
as a new kind of labor.
Thought of in another way, the hegemony
that has been constructed today is one in which the superstructure
has made peace with the counter-culture and redefined itself,
redefined capitalism, in the process. The ideal citizen/worker under
Neo Liberal Capitalism is not the Marlboro Man, it isn't Ward Cleaver
or Jimmy Stewart; it's the hipster--the suave, non-commital, ironic,
always disoriented but never out-of-place, never to be ridiculed
because never taking himself seriously Everyman who populates both
the swankest downtown cafes and the diviest ghetto and red-neck bars
at once.
Today's American culture is every bit
as or more homogenous as the culture of the conformist era of the
1950s, only the style of homogenization has changed. What we have
today is not a 1950's style homogeneity focused on the conscious
mind, but a deliberate and coherent harnessing of what Virmo refers
to as pre-consciousness. What we have today is a hegemony that
operates not by traditional brainwashing, but through what is
sometimes referred to as Noopolitics--by reducing human behavior to a
pursuit of emotional rather than sensual pleasures and thus
minimizing opportunities for the type of deep reflection that makes
ideology and conscious behavior significant. More concisely, hegemony
today operates not on the active thinking mind but on the mind at
rest. And if it can be shown, as Colin Campbell argues in The
Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, that modern
daily leisure activities serve as a form of productive labor that
involves a reduction of emotional intensity through daydreaming or
dream making--that is, if the passive mind has indeed been
harnessed--and if art inevitably reduces both emotional and sensory
intensity in its pursuit of pleasure, then literary and other arts
become intrinsically involved in upholding the consumer economy, in
acting as a facade that, even if revolutionary in content, can't help
but support the neo liberal Capitalist agenda. Literary artistic
expression becomes a type of subaltern voice that, unless
appropriated, can't be heard or properly spoken.
One recalls Adorno's famously misquoted
phrase about there being no poetry after Aschwitz. What he actually
said, within context, is that: "To
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the
knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.
Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one
of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.
Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it
confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation." Adorno
was writing in 1949, at the dawn of American conformism, but his
concern about the complete absorption of the mind by a capitalist or
fascist hegemony is just as relevant today; only, if we take
Noopolitics into consideration, one might argue that today the
primary mind being absorbed is that of the reader rather than the
writer, the audience instead of the creator, that in effect citizens
are being trained to manage their attention in such a way as to
resist conscious
deliberation in deference to pre-conscious activity designed to bring
consumerist pleasure, to the realm where bio and noo politics reign.
The disciplining of the body described by Foucoult (bio-politics) and
the disciplining of the pre-conscious resting mind described by
Lazzarrato (noopolitics) step in to shape attention and behavior
without a need for any explicit ideological support. In terms of
literature, this assumes that no revolutionary or subaltern reading
is possible regardless of how revolutionary a book's content.
Further, one would presume that if an entire culture's readership is
turned into a certain type of reader, that once the reading mind,
which is to say, the passive mind in search of pleasurable
stimulation, is absorbed in this way, then no subaltern voice can be
either read or spoken; the conscious mind is no longer master of
artistic inspiration. In a world focused on regulating subjectivity
rather than the actions of a subject, ideology has little power to
threaten the status-quo or to inform aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics
subsequently falls under the dominion of a new consumerist form of
pleasure-seeking, one dependent on the dreaming self's ability to
defer a genuine expectation of pleasure fulfillment. As Colin
Campbell explains: "The process of day-dreaming intervenes
between the formulation of a desire and its consummation; hence the
desiring and dreaming modes become interfused, with a dream element
entering into desire itself."The pleasure seeker of today still
employs actual memories, Campbell argues, but, through
day-dreaming--by re-imagining real experience to better coincide with
one's fantasies, a never-ending, never-perfected process--the modern
hedonist can heighten gratification by speculating on enjoyments that
are yet to come. He or she can enjoy the anticipation, in other
words, and the act of desiring itself becomes a pleasurable activity.
(p86) Thus, today's principal mode of pleasure-seeking is defined not
as a pursuit of material satisfaction but as a pursuit to remain in
and enjoy the pleasures of being in a state of desiring. Our most
sought for pleasure, that is, is the pleasure of contemplating
pleasure, the activity of daydreaming, of taking pleasure from
"possibilities", of making contact with a fantasy without
fulfilling the fantasy, which would satiate and lead likely to
boredom, would reduce or terminate the sought-for pleasure. Ideally
then, in contrast to both the pure escapist who sets out to enjoy a
fantasy that isn't attainable and, as such, is therefore in search of
a less intense pleasure, or the material pleasure seeker who seeks
attainment in the direct appeasement of the physical senses, the
modern neo-liberal subject wants to maintain the pleasant state of
mind of the daydreamer, someone who is within reach of a tangible
satisfaction but who never attains it, is never fulfilled and thereby
never bored or disillusioned.
As
a consequence, the desiring subject, which is to say a flexible
constantly shape-shifting subject that remains pliable to the demands
of both modern labor and modern consumption, replaces the unified and
conformist subject contested under Fordist Capitalism. Social
relations today require the flexibility and non-commital tolerance of
the day-dreamer. As a result, mere survival now requires being
implicit in, to become the barbarian required of a barbaric system.
Or, to reference Adorno again,
"it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no
longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural
question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially
whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have
been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the
coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without
which there could have been no Auschwitz."
Here
Adorno raises the concern that only the totally dominated mind is
allowed to exist let alone speak. One doesn't, however, have to
dominate the entire mind to accomplish the same level of domination
that Adorno worries about. One merely need create a world requiring
specific parts of the mind to govern behavior more than others, to
make those functions of the mind survival skills, and then to dominate
those particular mental faculties.
So as culture turns away from developed
thoughts or complex narratives, literature gets marginalized, pushed
outside of public discourse while simultaneously made relevant as a
force for counter hegemony--a contrast to the image-based culture
that harnesses counter-cultural ideals and non-reflective attention.
As a result, the texts that tend to get published are texts that
actively defy this new literary potential for subversiveness,
literature that pays homage to the image and to the dominant
discourse by defying consciousness, literature, that is, which not
only avoids but ridicules ideology and thoughtfulness, literature
that actively pushes the reader away from a literary aesthetic and
towards the pseudo-utopian potential of the image--literature, in
other words, that a neo-liberal public will actually want to read. At
the same time, and more importantly, literature that embodies even a
radical critique of the consumer subject, is rendered harmless. More
to the point, popular literature, even if supportive of a
revolutionary and/or subaltern message, becomes counter insurgent by
misrepresenting the system as "authoritative", as being an
ideological power and not a bio or noo power, while art that
challenges the real--and really complex--capitalist apparatus is
doomed to oblivion, to always be steered away from consciousness by
its well-conditioned audience towards the new territory being
exploited, the passive mind. Autonomist literature that tries
not to reinforce traditional subjectivity, which tries, as Samuel
Becket's plays do, to deconstruct the coherent Western subject and
resist commodification, must appeal to consciousness to do so--to a
conscious deactivation of subjectifying forces--but consciousness
doesn't constitute the modern private subject whose individuality is
now a collective and multi-faceted entity produced by and within
consumer culture. Autonomous art must, that is, be reduced to pure
aesthetics, be stripped of ideology, in order to retain its autonomy,
but, once reduced to pure aesthetics, to the non-conceptual, its
reception will be governed by pre-colonized and pre-conscious forces.
In one instance of literary revolt, in
popular literature such as The Hunger Games, we find
capitalism being treated negatively but inaccurately, as being a type
of external authority as opposed to a plastic network that is largely
self-realized. But within a society organized by bio and noo power,
no external authority is required. The result is that this type of
anti-capitalist popular art ultimately strengthens capitalist
hegemony by redirecting revolutionary impulses toward a false facade
that, protected by abstraction, can never be destroyed. The actions
of the counter culture are channeled into a class struggle that only
exists within literary and artistic universes, and revolutionary
activity is downgraded to attacking windmills.
On the other hand, literary artists
that understand and accurately represent modern, complex, and pliant
capitalist forces, are pushed so far outside popular culture as to
have a similar overall effect--that of channeling thoughts of revolt
to a private and personal universe beyond the reach of market
appropriation but also beyond the reach of collective action. Realism
becomes accessible only as pure artifice, within an autonomous zone
that isn't meant to be representational. Consequently, literature is
made less relevant to actual circumstances and revolt can be seen as
a seemingly "detached" activity, one limited to fantasy
production, an already territorialized process. We can revolt all we
want, the modern capitalist system tells us, but only in our
imaginations! Revolutionary resistance is then governed by
pre-conscious activities that can only be satisfied within a private
and pre-territorialized part of the mind. The modern mind's training
in de-emphasizing ideology, in distancing reality and real criticism
in order to maintain pleasurable expectations, and the now
strengthened impetus to defer satisfaction, because the deferment
itself (of Utopian ideals, etc.) is now gratifying, ensures that no
matter how accurate and convincing the artistic critique, it will be
easily converted into a harmless pleasure-fulfillment--a deferred
satisfaction, a possible but never satisfied reality that maintains a
"desiring state of mind" in preference to a concrete plan
for achievement. In short, no matter how authentic a book's
revolutionary criticism, it can be turned into a commodity by its
readers. Liberatory impulses must be re-channeled to a private and
subsequently impotent world. They, like all other impulses and
desires, get pushed inside, forced into becoming part of a private
but multitudinous "inner life", the only life where
liberation is achievable. The day-dreamer which neo-liberal
Capitalist social relations insist upon and reinforce, the person we
have to become to participate within modern society, the person we
must become in order perhaps to survive, is now in charge of our
aesthetic responses and makes sure that no counter ideology can touch
it. The daydreamer, that is, which is today both a producer and a
product of consumer capitalism, becomes skilled at internalizing
utopian aspirations so that they become consumerist pleasures rather
than revolutionary quests. The modern subject is trained to ensure
that possibilities remain possibilities and nothing else, that the
revolutionary impulse is forever deferred and endlessly enjoyed but
never fully gratified or acted on, much like staring at a poster of
the New York City skyline and deriving enjoyment from it by imagining
what it would be like to someday live in the city but repressing and
deferring the urge to actually move there because the reality would
either disillusion or make one imaginatively poorer, with one less
satisfying possibility in one's repertoire from which to derive
emotional enjoyment. Put simply, one must defer material pleasures,
the pleasures of the traditional hedonist, whether it be the enticing
thrills offered by New York City or the social justice of a
post-revolutionary society, in favor of the emotional pleasures begot
by the daydreamer. The revolutionary struggle itself becomes today's
Utopia in place of a post-revolutionary world in which revolutionary
goals have been achieved.
But none of this is to say that all
literature is doomed to degenerate into propaganda or even that
popular genre literature can't contribute to the construction of an
effective counter hegemony, but the task of the revolutionary artist
today, the task, really, of every artist who seeks not to actively
support the status quo, has changed dramatically. The challenge is no
longer to change or influence people's thoughts and opinions, but to
alter the tangible mechanisms of perception. Literature today, as
Deleuze argues, must stake out territory in degenerate networks, thus
reconfiguring meaning and understanding anew. It must hone in on that
which is left over in the hegemonic process, on the pathologies and
disorders of the modern mind which haven't yet been harnessed for
production. But even that isn't enough. Once perception is
reappropriated, new channels for utopian energies have to be created.
The revolutionary impulse mustn't be merely liberated, it must open
onto a counter ideological message, one that isn't imposed but which
emerges from revolutionary praxis rather than from university offices
or mountain-top retreats. Art may not drive effective social change,
but it can facilitate change by focusing on the war of position
advocated by Antonio Gramsci. The literary artist of today cannot
afford to take refuge in solitude, to withdraw into her creativity;
rather, her creativity must develop out of concrete revolutionary
activities and membership within tangible revolutionary communities.
(wherein new identities might be born and endure). In brief, the
artist must become first a revolutionary subject before her art can
speak revolutionary thoughts. She must seek less to create new
worlds, or autonomous but fictional worlds, and instead locate the
anti-alienating forces already with us, those forces already created
by anti-capitalist movements, and to then embody and articulate those
forces in new literary forms. She must become Gramsci's organic
intellectual, a subject whose voice arises directly from within the
revolutionary struggle and who then appropriates literary conventions
(not the other way around) for her own subversive purposes and her
own subversive audience.
