The thing I find interesting about this comment is that, while I certainly don’t disagree with it, I wonder if it misses the point? Because, lord knows, there are people at the protest who are fighting for things I would never stand behind in a million years…but it seems like a lot of them are just there to say, “Hey! My life is in shambles, the ideals of our society are crumbling before our eyes. Maybe this is your fault, or maybe it isn’t. Either way, you have the power and the means to start a change. So do it.” I’m not convinced it’ll work…but I don’t know that they need to have one specific statement.
Or maybe they do, and it’s just that there’s a lot more inequality and hardship than really seems necessary.
(via lamerveilleuse)
But if you have some unfocused, nebulous message, what are you asking for? How does anyone work towards a goal that there’s no path to and when you’re not even sure what it is?
(via blownspeakers)
Rather than respond to Quinn myself, I’m just gonna let Giorgio Agamben do it for me:
“What the state cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)… Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear”.
— The Coming Community, p. 85-86
(via lukesimcoe)
Gotta agree with Luke and Agamben here, although I’ll state my support for the plurality of the common and its hesitation toward reductionism somewhat differently. When it seemed to be emerging that the message was ‘get Wall Street out of government’ I felt deflated. To be sure, financial capital has enhanced the misery and suffering of countless people. But this singular message reduced the plurality of struggles faced by attendees to a (statist) political demand. This demand, radical though in some ways it may be, is functional to its core, and it would be almost managerial to try to reduce the problems faced by these folks and their complaints to a neatly demarcated focus.
(via 20yardsoflinen)
The take I took from David Harvey’s great, very clear book The Enigma of Capital is that the struggle to find “focus” can and does help establish common ground, which, while not actually reducing or overwriting a “plurality of struggles” (instead, in fact, drawing them together in a multifaceted but shared project), is pretty essential for making widespread change. That’s especially true considering the big target, namely capitalism, which is really rather big, isn’t it? He also encourages, correctly I think, making connections across levels of organization, which would mean not dumbly tossing out the baby of more statist type political demands with the bath water of state-supported capitalism, writ large. While more individualized, issue-centered forms of critique and resistance are valuable, to be sure, a little unanimity, even if only ad hoc and temporary, is going to go a long, long way towards effectively producing progressive change (arguably a much longer way than only a perplexing and perplexed superabundance of more particularized protests without a shared sense of target). Anyway, this is a link to a good lecture that covers the gist of his book: HERE.
(via 20yardsoflinen)
