Jajuna

Currently, there is an article at The Nation  by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher  that questions the viability of a socialist alternative to capitalism at the present juncture. Following this, are a series of responses by Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Bill Mckibbon, and Rebcca Solnit, who each add their two-cents on possibilities for what such a movement could and should look like.

There is little disagreement among the contributers that neoliberal capitalism represents a dead-end for short and long term social and economic sustainability. They cite many of the utterly dire environmental projections we have become accustumed to hearing. As an example, I saw last week that scientists predict an entire collapse of the planet’s ocean life by 2048. I dont think that we are well equiped to understand what such a catastrophe might actually mean for ecological and human life. The contributors also offer various critiques of late capitalism. None forsee its chastening within the current crisis. The various technocratic realignments we are witnessing, while perhaps offering a bit more regulatory sanity, do not address the long term problems and consequences of an endless-growth political economy.       

On the question of developing alternative democratic futures, the contributors are slightly less certain. For Ehrenreich and Fletcher, a more sustainable and equitable blueprint for democratic life will only and can only come from mass social movements. Their’s is a revolutionary mobilization premised on a radical democratic model for power sharing which can ensure civil liberties while co-ordinating various types of social exchange - ala Michael Alperts’ “parecon” model. Mckibbon, Wallerstein, and Ali suggest that the global north has much to learn from Latin America concerning strategic opposition and sustainable movements. Wallerstein suggests three tasks for the left:

1. Promote intellectual clarity about the fundamental choice. Then organize at a thousand levels and in a thousand ways to push things in the right direction. The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify.

2. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of global justice and ecological sanity.

3. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism.

Below, I have included Rebcca Solnit’s response in full. I do so because I think she offers a sense of how these tasks are already being put into practice at a number of scales and contexts. She also insightfully articulates the fundamental tension within these democratic projects: How are we to think about balancing community determination with the neccessity of larger regulatory structures? Her comments rightly point out that older models of state socialism are as undesirable as neoliberalism. She suggests that there are a multitude of examples of locally-based social movements that are pursuing sustainable projects beyond the state and outside the market. The question remains, can such a networked anti-hierarchical schema negotiate the neccessary structural authority to maintain coherence and to ensure sustainability, liberty, and equity?

Here is Solnit’s response in full:

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write mournfully that there was supposed to be a revolution–but there was and is a revolution, just not one that looks the way socialists and a lot of ’60s radicals imagined it. The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated, is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European utopian communities.

In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones–a revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism generally produce. This revolt is taking place in the vast open space of Detroit, in the inner-city farms of West Oakland, in the victory gardens and public-housing of Alemany Farm in San Francisco, in Growing Power in Milwaukee and many other places around the country. These are blows against alienation, poor health, hunger and other woes fought with shovels and seeds, not guns. At its best, tending one’s garden leads to tending one’s community and policy, and ultimately becomes a way of entering the public sphere rather than withdrawing from it.

“Do we have a plan, people?” Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

If anarchists and neoliberals had one thing in common, it was an interest in shrinking the state that socialists hoped would solve things. Right now nothing but that state exists on a scale to drag us back out of what the corporations and international markets dragged us into, but one of the questions for the long term is about scale. Small isn’t always beautiful, but big beyond accountability or comprehension got crazy as well as ugly.

I just took another spin through Jacques Rancière’s  “The Politics of Aesthetics” and have been trying to puzzle through the relationship it sets up between art and politics. The book is a relatively brisk read, as it is really nothing more than a series of brief responses by Ranciere to questions posed by editor Gabriel Rockhill. However, I still find it quite difficult to begin a discussion of Ranciere’s philosophy as it is constructed out of a loose arrangement of inter-implicated concepts. As one engages a particular concept within the arrangement, the pull of the remaining conceptual network becomes immediately apparent. This arrangement and interplay of concepts mirrors the theory of aesthetics (and sociality) that Rancière puts forth. I don’t think that it is any accident that this text ends on a meditation concerning the aesthetics of theoretical writing. He states “a theoretical discourse is always an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the fact it is arguing about”. The next line and last sentence of the book reads: “Here we come back to our beginning” (66).The beginning to which Rancière refers is indeed his initial discussion of aesthetics within the first few pages of the text, thus he offers a performative gesture of the theory which he constructs throughout the work.

The poetic form of Rancière’s text, however, does not necessarily confer upon it a political character. Rancière contends that while aesthetics are inherent to any form of politics, politics are a rare occurrence. This is one of the significant distinctions between Rancière and other theorists of his generation such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. While sharing much in common with these thinkers particularly in his critique of representational thinking, Rancière situates politics as singular moments of possibility rather than as intrinsic to everyday relations of power. This means that while aesthetic works (art) may always contain the potential to become political, this does not mean that art and politics share a determined relationship.

As we discover throughout the book “art and politics are contingent notions” (51). Art is the work attributed to ways of “doing and making” within what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of the sensible”. This partition of the sensible describes what presents itself to sense experience: the fields of visibility and sayability which form both what is common and discrete within a community. It constitutes then, the aesthetic frames by which bodies, statements, and shares are arranged within unequal, yet consensual alignments of recognition. While art is inherent to this aesthetic distribution, this does not casually affix political value to works of art. It does, however, indicate that politics contains an inherent aesthetic and artistic valence.

Politics for Rancière occur only when an element (individual, group, statement, image, speech act) is able to disrupt the distribution of perception and, in turn, reconfigure it through its very emergence. This disruptive act, or dissensus, as Rancière refers to it, turns on a particular principle. By rejecting a “science of the hidden”, the search for meaning behind the surface of appearances, Rancière negates the possibility for a privileged position of mastery over knowledge. “Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established. I have tried to conceive of a topography that does not presuppose this position of mastery” (p.49). On this topography outside mastery, which Rancière situates as historically contingent systems of possibilities, relations of interpretation and meaning-making become, in theory, available equally to all. This vision of equality stands as an undetermined universal presupposition. The act of politics occurs when this universal is pressed into service in a singularized form, when a group or an individual with a lesser standing in the social order disrupts the distribution of the sensible, and thus gives form and content to their fundamental equality within the social order.

While this vision of dissensus signals the aesthetic and artistic within the political, it denies any political determinacy to artistic and or aesthetic practices. The problem is that there is an “undecidable” element to art. This is to say that its effects within given frameworks of experience cannot be mapped onto stable forms of meaning. This makes putting art into the service of politics highly precarious. Rancière states that “the dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle” (63). This sets up an aporia for political art. As Rancière would reject art with a “message” that is to evoke proscribed responses, he insists that art must translate meaning through its ruptural potential in such a way that does not altogether eliminate the legibility of political meaning. He states that this entails a process of negotiation. “Suitable political art, at one and the same time, would ensure a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (63). Political art negotiates this double effect at its own peril. While the readability of the message threatens to undue arts affective force, this force simultaneously places its political meaning into doubt. Such is the challenge to art and politics that Rancière offers, and which he attempts to navigate within his philosophy and writing.