Doug
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Caution this is a very rambling post.
The disappearance of the public realm--the political realm, metaphorically the forum, the podium, delineated, but part of a public plaza, shared with the market of vendors, hawkers, and hucksters for local wares. That image, that dual nature of public life, the political and economic is the core of a greco-roman city build around such a public plaza. It is that image that is missing. Missing almost everywhere.
This is an interesting thread for a lot of historical and cultural reasons--many other reasons as well.
When I started back to reading Marx this summer, I was struck by an odd impression that I had had once before. Marx didn't live in anything like a democratic state until he moved to Paris. And even then, it was as if he didn't realize the fury of the activities that surrounded him where equally political and economic. I am sure the political rhetoric of the time must have seemed like so much hot air compared to the grinding poverty of factory life--the ominous presence of a grim faced urban proletariat. In the face of that presence, who cares what the hysterical literary politicos are screaming? It must have been unimaginable that either such rhetoric or the duplicity of the existing political apparatus could be anything else--could be anything but a means of oppression.
Something similar happened to Thomas Mann growing up in Bismark's pre-WWI Germany. On the eve of the armistice, Mann published a collection of essays called, "Confessions of a Non-Political Man." These were profoundly anti-political, anti-French, and were so obnoxiously nationalistic that the early nazis movement considered him one of their own. But the point was that Mann had no idea what living in a democratic state was like. That is, his class the haute bourgeoise took it for granted that their political and economic interests were represented--which they were of course. But in addition it never occurred to Mann in that period that the broad mass of people had no political representation at all and no means of gaining that public voice outside of insurrection and mass strikes. In other words their only form of representation was the disruption of the economy. In his arrogance in that period he consider them (us) the common herd. When he heard the gun shots in the night out in the suburbs of Munich (while writing _A Man and His Dog_), he started thinking about the meaning of a political life--thinking a lot. Here is a little excerpt from his diaries (Feb 22, 1919):
"..Katia burst into my room with the news, which she had just learned by telephone, that Eisner has been assassinated by a Count Arco. Shock, horror, and disgust with the whole thing. What will the consequences be?--Short walk with Katia and the children along the Isar in serene, mild spring weather.--There have been several of these senseless bloody crimes. Eisner's murderer--some say he is a member of a student corps, others that he is an army officer--was promptly shot in turn by the minister's secretary. A Spartakist poster brands him a tool of the bourgeoisie, and summons the workers to a meeting on the Theresienwiese. Armed men forced their way into the Landtag, which had just assembled for the first time, and fired shots. Minister Auer was severely wounded; a Center deputy and a general, it said, were shot. Defense Minister Rosshaupter, pale as death, was seen being taken away by soldiers, under arrest. Planes were circling over the city dropping leaflets telling of the events and urging everyone to keep calm...The idiocy of Arco's deed at this moment must be immediately obvious, but many people are delighted by it. Our boys' schoolmates applauded and danced when the news came." (Thomas Mann Diaries, Abrams, NY:1982, 38p)
Switching gears here, one of Hanna Ahrendt's personal discoveries was the nature of a political state and its potential separations from an economic system. She too grew up in a middle class Germany that was endlessly trying to form itself as a political state and failing (the period opened in Mann's diary above, Wiemar)
So, all three Marx, Mann, and Ahrendt were not born with a politics as such, but discovered them--rather these were imposed through historical context. This is a little odd when you consider how we (or I) arrived into an intellectual world. We (in the US) are given a political sphere (failed or not) and assume it as a ground. It is that presumption, or given condition that was missing for them. I suspect that discovery, that transformation process is what is occurring all over the world--especially Russia and China. As Malraux put it in _Man's Fate_, speaking of the general strike that started the first Chinese revolution, "they are discovering that they exist." But Malraux made the opposite mistake from Mann, in that he already assumed a political dimension existed when in fact it didn't. What is interesting about his mistake was the fact that he grew up in a hyperbolic political state, more or less blind to its economic processes and dimensions. In other words, Malraux was blind in almost the same way that Mann was blind, but in the opposite sense.
Then returning to here and now, it is apparent to me that since the commodification of the sixties political movements, that is their transformation into consumer products, including the endless video clips and documentaries, the political construction of those movements--the idea that they were political constructions--has somehow disappeared.
This is a complicated thought, but the process of subsuming these movements into an economic system by commodification has obscured their political dimension--their political means. And then further, the process of commodification became co-mingled in way that I really don't understand, with an originally political idea that a personal life and its interiority or identity and personal relations should have a political dimension. It is not that I don't agree that identity has a political dimension both as a construction and as a living process, because I do think it has. However, the way that political dimension has been explored and the manner in which the various movements involved have constructed themselves and their domain of interest, has in yet another historical dimension, become almost the epitome of commodification itself. So now we can all buy and sell identity movement commodities as if doing so were a political movement! Or worse, that buying and selling such items is a statement against Capitalism, while we simultaneously deny the very process we are enacting? Amazing duplicity--schizophrenic dissociation is more like it. I have visions of the peasants in Brunel's _Viridiana_ (spell?) buggering the Spice Girls on the banquet table--call it 'Marxism takes Revenge' or maybe "Karl does Ginger"?
When you combined this commodification process with the active destruction of political discourse by the Right (aided by the Left and its own moralistic propaganda), then we now have several generations of people who have no idea what it means to be, to exist in a political dimension--make speeches, write, meet, organize, get representation, advocate in court, change and write law, and so forth.
This failure to distinguish the economic and political realms from one another, also reminds me to say something about Amartya Sen--or at least what I read about him and his work--off the web. While it is great that someone with a deep humanitarian nature won the Noble for work on understanding the economic policy dynamics that create famine and extreme poverty, there is an assumption here that needs to be made more explicit. That assumption is that the means to change such conditions lays within the purview of a bureaucratic state--the hands of experts. It is not that, that isn't accurate, since it is hard to imagine any other means outside of insurrection and revolution, but think here for a moment. The implication that only humanitarian policy by experts or mass revolt are the historical means of change. What happened to the political realm of representative government? It seems to disappear in this discourse as it seems to evaporate everywhere.
Chuck Grimes