The word "immanent" has appeared regularly in this discussion, in the sense that "you can't be immanent at OWS while criticizing it". I think that borders on the confessional. To start, I can't be "immanent" at OWS because I can't get there for a few reasons and don't even think I have enough spare change to scrounge from the couch cushions to order the Zucotti Park Team a pizza. That's deeply practical, but does that excommunicate me? Since I can't participate, am I allowed to discuss it? Or am I only allowed to cheer it? While I assume Google et al. crawl this list it's not "Left Business Observer Talks with The Chamber of Commerce Boosters Club" so I don't think that too much criticism here is of use to bourgie repressive types. Second, assuming I was at OWS, would my criticism of it somehow make me 'non-immanent'? I'm not a diety, I'm a human. I 'occupy' whereever the fuck I am. If I'm at Zucotti Park and get arrested and pepper-sprayed but have some reservations about certain sentiments articulated by OWS, am I not really OWS? That's just fucking stupid. If you can't 'trust' me because I have some difference, don't, and don't expect my support in the quest to discover New Ways of Shitting (a project I'd support), or whatever clever provocative mythopoetic statement you make.
Which really gets me to my third and final annoyance. You want to talk about Foucauldian microphysics of power, then what the hell is this? An outspoken minority with some pretension to representing a purported project of having no projects, and able to--by whatever skill at power and micro-biobiopolitics as it were--continue to maintain that stance and position against another minority which does not claim to be representative makes that first group a de facto, informal leader of some sort or another. It creates a hierarchy of truth and authority, visible here and elsewhere, and obviously subscribed to. That is a contradiction in terms. I hate to keep pounding Greatest Hits of Theory but this is Levi-Strauss all over again: myth--that there is no agenda because to have an agenda replicates the repressive state and/or MCM-CMC system and/or lack of personal autonomy and agency and/or whatever--in practice--that is, as 'led' by the high confessors of New Ways of Eating--simply creates another arena for those contradictions to play out. The only problem is that in this instance, Old Lefties vs. The Anarchist Poets is a dynamic that feeds this damnable mythology.
Contingently I'd conclude that the only way to get past this is to ignore it, or treat it with an unconcerned condescension. It doesn't fucking matter, and those people aren't going to go away any time soon, if decades of abusing Foucault are any indication. Obviously people engaged in the big happy temporary autonomous zone of Occupy Everything are, contra the myth by and large receptive to and willing to engage with individuals who do want to discuss concrete matters, like a jobs program. "Jobs For All" is exactly the sort of demand that will not be met by the state-capital complex in its present incarnation, and cannot be met without significant change in that complex. Tangentially, I think that this might enable us to recover ethics. In its normal sense "ethics" usually means "acting as an agent from a personal sense of right and wrong", but agency implies that there is a 'patient' to that agent, and that said 'patient' is owed and has every right to demand the fulfillment of what is due to them. Put simply and to attempt, hamfistedly, another co-optation, there cannot be a "Right to Work" if there is no way to provide that work.
-- Nathan