Naomi Klein: "The Vision Thing"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Jul 11 08:34:24 PDT 2000



> >From a fwd from Yoshie (The Vision Thing, Naomi Klein, The Nation):
>
>So how do you extract coherence from a movement filled with
>anarchists, whose greatest tactical strength so far has been its
>similarity to a swarm of mosquitoes?....
>
>-----------
>
>I am tempted to ask, and the point was...? These calls for more
>tightly organized and concerted action are premature. Just keep up the
>drone against these global bastions and see what happens.
>
>There was a Charlie Rose interview the other night with
>Carter-Bresson(?) the photographer. Rose kept asking him, `so what is
>photography to you' and C-B kept saying the same thing. Its sketching
>with one finger, its the ethic of anarchism. Rose couldn't understand
>these responses, because he was hung up on the word anarchy.
>
>Rose could see that C-B's photographs are some of the most classically
>well composed and geometrically rational images ever made. How could
>they come from an ethic of anarchy? Form arrives of its own out of the
>continency of the moment. Paz called it the poetics of now. That's
>what Bresson was trying to tell Rose.
>
>So, wait and see.

I agree with you on the "keep up the drone & see what happens" part (what else can we do?), and so does Klein, but I don't think that the culture of "serial protests" that Klein speaks about is caused by the ethic of anarchism as a consciously held political philosophy, nor is it anything new in America. Protest politics (in the absence of mass-based left-wing political parties) has been the mainstay of U.S. politics. The same goes for "coalitions of coalitions." It's just that with "the explosion of NGOs" and issue-oriented groups & grouplets, the already existing tendency (what Klein calls "paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for external connection") has become intensified. Another difference is that now this mode of politics may be becoming (or may have already become) global, not just American or even "Western," in the absence of two former alternatives (social democracy or revolutionary Marxism and/or nationalism). It's a sign of the times, so it's pointless to bemoan it, but it's also nothing so exalted as "the poetics of now." So when Klein says, "perhaps rather than moving toward more centralization, what is needed is further radical decentralization," she ends up going further than even making a virtue out of necessity, in my opinion, but such pronouncements, too, are signs of the times, I suppose.

Yoshie



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