I'm glad you got to hit up your local occupy. :)
At 04:37 PM 10/22/2011, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>K, I don't disagree with a single word you wrote below. What is it exactly
>about my comment that you thought was counter to anything you said?
>
>I definitely think that the "individualism" of a vacuous consumer society
>will be a problem for OWS; it is evident in some of the new-agey
>corporatist demands I've seen. I also completely agree that the experience
>of working together can radically alter notions of individual/collective.
>
>Joanna
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "shag carpet bomb" <shag at cleandraws.com>
>
>
>Johanna:
> > Yes, it's very sad and politically problematic. But perhaps it's the
>case that the emptier people are made to feel, the more important it
>is for them to assert their "individuality."
> > A nation of exurbs and chain stores, teeming with individuals.
>
>I think one important problem with doug's reading of autonomy is that
>he's unaware of a tradition of seeing it much differently. Nomos
>doesn't mean law, rather there's a sociological meaning that refers to
>the Greek 'nomos' as all the tacit rules, norms, practices that
>organize our shared lives together in our daily activities. Peter
>Berger calls it meaningful order.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomos_(sociology) additionally, simply
>google "positive freedom" + autonomy.
>
>Be that as it may, I'm not sure I would describe the people in our
>Occupy as people made to feel empty but one thing is clear: the
>ecstasy - the collective effervescence and energy -- is overflowing
>because there is an opportunity to debate issues with one another, to
>figure out how to do so without getting into disastrous fights (it
>gets heated), and the recognition that, together, they can get things
>done even when there are serious disagreements.
>
>There was a debate over the demands working group, one fellow said,
>"this is a declaration of independence. this isn't about demanding
>things from the king. they didn't make demands; they declared
>independence."
>
>This was said on the heels of a small , but invigorating, victory
>where the group had pulled together unimaginable resources, negotiated
>with
>various local businesses, entities, and law enforcement, in order to
>set up a power station and internet connection. What is most
>interesting to me is that the building of interpersonal relationships
>is inevitable in such a situation, in this case, there's also an acute
>awareness that complete strangers, sometimes very far away, are not
>just supporting them but giving them money, supplies, resources,
>access.
>
>It occurred to me after that young man said that, especially after he
>turned and said, I don't know a whole lot about the circumstances
>then, does anyone know?, that they are rewriting Robinson Crusoe and
>Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
>
>It's like they've been shipwrecked and they must figure out how to
>survive, together, working off what they have of existing society -
>with its traditions, technologies, art, music, credos, declarations,
>laws, history, culture, norms. I mean, you can't help but flounder
>around and realize how dependent you are on a host of things,
>practices, and ideas you once took for granted. You are keenly aware
>of society, of civilization, and all it has bequeathed to you at this
>point. How else do you get a power station and a secure internet
>connection up and running without recognizing how precisely you are
>bound up in,
>dependent on, and necessary to society and its continued existence.
>
>This is what autonomy looks like. It's what I described earlier as the
>"cultivation of practices which nurture citizens capable of autonomous
>democratic self-rule where practices and authorities are understood as
>something we must actively, consciously agree to and participate in,
>rather than merely accept them as natural. In the name of democracy,
>it is claimed that a social order might possibly to transcend its own
>naturalized arbitrariness."
>
>Here, the process gives the birth of a sense of self keenly felt as
>part of something quite larger than the self. This is why autonomy is
>always posed as distinct from, if not the opposite of, liberty. Where
>autonomy is freedom understood positively, the freedom to, as opposed
>to a liberty where freedom is understood negatively, the freedom from.
>
>What you know is that you have never done any of this alone, but with
>the help of myriad people, many of whom you are building relationships
>with at the encampment, but also many people who help make things
>happen who never show up. They live in the wilds of North Carolina and
>can't make it, so they are sending a generator. They live 40 miles
>away in Onancock, but they will write the working paper. They work all
>day and have small children, but they are sending $500 they raised at
>church.
>
>All of a sudden, someone shows up with a car full of tarps, tents,
>blankets, water, food. You have so much food, in fact, you don't know
>what to do with it. You have money coming in and you have to figure
>out what to do with it. How do you work within existing institutions
>to put money for the group into a bank and be sure some jackass
>doesn't abscond with it? How do you run a facebook group on collective
>principles when it is clear that not everyone can be an admin. How do
>you amanage it with 10 admins? You contemplate all that and think,
>"woah dude. This shit's getting complicated." Then, two guys show up
>who know how to build a sustainable source of energy to power laptops.
>Someone runs into the camp excitedly saying she's found two local
>business who will let us set up a wireless connection.
>
>The naysayers can sneer at this, they can call this prefigurative
>politics simple-minded, they can dismiss it as a lot of drum circle
>folderol. Obviously, there is much amusement about all this, although
>perhaps poor Max can pour some ketchup on it like my dad poured
>ketchup on the Army's hamburger gravy to make it a little more
>palatable. :)
>
>But the people who enter into this kind of politics are not, by any
>means, uncritically reproducing the empty bourgeois individualism
>fostered by shopping malls and consumerism, where citizenship has been
>reduced to carrying around knapsacks of preferences which you whip out
>at cash registers in order to make your (vote) preferences known, with
>little understanding of how those preferences are socially
>constituted, let alone a meaningful say in how those products were
>made, who made them, how they were paid, what their labor conditions
>were like.
>
>Instead, when you have to figure out how to build something together
>like this, you realize that you never build it from scratch, you are
>always working off the old. Witness the young man who becomes
>keenly aware that he needs some guidance from 1776 which then propels
>him to a history book to ask questions of his answers. Under such
>conditions, you have to continually question everything you once
>assumed was a given, was normal, was just the way things were. This is
>often exhilerating, it is the source of the joy you see, it is why
>they feel powerful. It is why some of them will lay their asses on the
>line for this, why they will be willing to die for it. It is not
>because they are asserting an individuality against a hollow core of
>emptiness bequeathed them by a chain store that they would have their
>arms twisted behind their backs as a boot is shoved on their neck,
>their face smashed into concrete.
>
>As they build a life together, as they exercise this prefigurative
>politics in precisely the way someone who's been in traction for six
>months exercises atrophied muscles, they develop an sense of autonomy
>in what might otherwise seem a rather mundane experience: generating a
>power supply and firing up an internet connection.
>
>They have to ask, in a way they never asked before,where does power to
>run a laptop come from? How do we get internet connectivity?. How do
>we get it to where we need it. Who 'owns' it, who controls it? And
>now, for our shipwrecked crew, how do we want to make it, run it,
>control it, maintain it? What has worked? What didn't work? Compelled
>by the force of circumstances to answer those practical questions, you
>are, at the same time, compelled to finally see, or are at the very
>least nourishing the abilities that will allow you to finally see what
>the old man said were the real conditions of life and our
>relationships with one another.
>
>And if that sense of autonomy within community isn't quite so profound
>well, my money is on the capacity for people involved in *this* kind
>of mobilization to be more capable of at last facing with sober senses
>the real conditions of life and their relations with those whom they
>know and those whom they will never know. I surely do not see how that
>sort of understanding will ever be built by anyone sitting around
>casting ballots and wanly gazing at the Communist Horizon.
>
>In Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Wolfe constantly points the reader at
>the snaking tangle of power cords at every acid test. The power cords
>amp their instruments and voices. Without it, nothing would happen.
>The tangle of power cords symbolized their connection to society and
>Wolfe, by point at them, signaled the Merry Pranksters failure to
>recognize how dependent they were on this society, even as they
>ostensibly rebelled against it. Their's was a fantasy of being outside
>society.
>
>I don't see that going on in these encampments. The prefigurative
>politics is, intriguingly, making everyone acutely aware of tradition,
>culture, norms, unspoken values, tacit assumption, art, history,
>civilization, technology. They are called into questions - and that
>process of calling into question is both exhilarating and exhausting -
>but so far I haven't heard one single person say, as students used to
>say to me, "Do we always have to think so hard about everything. Can't
>we just watch the news and veg out?"
>
>No one wants to veg out yet. They will, eventually. They will become
>exhausted by the constant demand to engage in conscious social
>reproduction. And when they do, they will - as countless people have
>before them - figure out a way to resolve the problem.
>
>BTW, I couldn't agree with Voyou more.
>
>
>
>
>
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