Beating an Undead Horse: Imagining the New Left Imagining

Sadly, I came to the SDS party too late to provide much of a reasonable comment; the moment to do so, the moment in which a comment might have been effective, might have offered something productive, had passed. This is, in some ways, what the entire argument revolves around, the notion of a history that is at once both concrete and unbound, both nuanced and simplistic.  If Scott had not believed that the moment for theatre and symbolic politics had passed, perhaps that the moment should never have existed in the first place, I doubt he would have written his initial post.  Had not many at LS been cheered by the SDS being reconstituted, born anew, and that this rebirth marked a time that had come, perhaps there would be no need for Charles' rejoinder. Let's think of this as the first impasse, or the first tension.

The second is equally obvious, but nevertheless deserves additional investment.  Scott embraces a form of leftist politics that is - I don't know what he wants to call it, but for the sake of convenience - pragmatic.  He wants a politics of the left that, like those of the far right, transformed the political organization of the left (which I assume he means the Democrats?).  The SDS strikes him, and others, as a symbolic politics, at times "purely symbolic," at other times merely "symbolic."  Either way, these sorts of New Left theatre, these playful interventions that are tantamount to pragmatic concessions within the political arena, are to be disdained.  Others feel differently.  At stake is what might be understood as the substance or essence of the symbolic (Jon has taken it in this direction).  That's one way to look at it, though I want to propose that this tension, though it owes much to Scott's imprecise (and indeed, malformed) deployment of the term, makes less sense within the register of the symbolic and more within the register of the imaginary.

A long post follows.

Let's go in order.  The first faultline is that of time, specifically that of history.  Let us assume, as I think it's safe to assume, that what we have here are variations in the validity of historical causality.  Scott has, on a couple of occasions, made the following three prong claim: that there exists "a substantial link between the 1) demise of real leftist politics in the US, 2) the rise of actual far right conservatism and 3) the reason why the left shouldn't repeat the mistakes that led to #1."  This is, of course, rubbish.  For a guy who spends a lot of time maligning folks for their simplistic understanding of history, there seems to be an astounding ignorance of the whole confounding factor problem that makes historiography so difficult.  The decline and fall of the Soviet Union, to name but one of the many components that served as balast and balances on this particular chain of events, hurt the politics of the American left far more than it hurt the right, since, as Rushkoff and others have noted, it removed the specter of a far left from the public imaginary, leaving the far right alone and tipping the scales in the other direction.  Rather than a happy compromise between far right and far left, a compromise that seemed both centrist/moderate and distinctly american, there was no longer an effective counterbalance to far right ideology, and so the "middle" shifted inexorably right.  Yes?  No?  Who cares. 

My point is rather that far more substantial historical events can explain the rise of the far right by way of understanding that, thanks to the larger historical influences, the far left never had a chance.  Want another example?  How about the argument, made by several, that television uniquely privileges political simplifications, and that conservative ideology is, by and large, a more simplified system of political warrants?  Explaining that the poor lack moral character or that you earned it so it's your money or that the government is inefficient because it costs more than a business might spend to do the same thing is significantly easier and significantly more adaptable to the rhythmic dictates of televisual news than are explanations of the correspondence between historical productions of poverty and their continuation, not to mention the social stigma that gets attached to those out-groups who often represent the lower economic spectrum (the irish, then blacks, then hispanics, and so on), or that the value of "your" money comes from a confluence of legal enforcement and fraud regulations funded and enforced by people you don't know and will never meet who make possible your ability to earn, and that the value of a dollar is determined not by you but by a complex web of financial interactions and currency exchange, as well as speculative expectations regarding future purchasing power, or finally, that businesses are more efficient because they externalize costs, and that typically these externalizations are funded by tax dollars, and therefore, none of the above conservative assertions make much sense.   Difficult, not impossible, but pretty damn difficult to do well.  So perhaps the rise of and eventual dominance of televisual news formats can be blamed for the failure of the left, independently of any of the failures of the New Left's intended goals.

Now those are interesting historical games, of course.  And I enjoy them as much as the next non-historian.  But we shouldn't pretend that, for the sake of the argument, that we can simply spin a simple narrative and assume that such a narrative supports our contention.  This is true when we're asserting whether or not protests actually impacted the prosecution of the Vietnam War.  And it's equally true when one asserts that the left "monopolized populist discourse for the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries," which is a claim so preposterous it makes one wonder about the quality of the Kool-Aid.  (For those of you drinking said Kool-Aid, let me merely cite: the American eugenics movement, the KKK, nazi sympathizers in the United States, the various anti-immigrations laws passed, the delays at getting any anti-monopolizations laws in place, etc. - or I could recommend that one go out and read any of the histories of the American progressive movement, say McGerr's Fierce Discontent.  I might also recommend that one actually read about the rise of modern conservatism from folks who spend their time actually researching it, works like Diamond's Road to Dominion, or read about the role that mediation plays in shaping content, like The Press Effect, which is a fast and easy primer).

Now I don't really want us to go out and be historians.  I find that historians are much better at actually doing that, and while I like reading, I also like to stick with what I'm particularly good at.  Which isn't vague historical assertion, oh no.  I am, as my presence on the LS contributors might indicate, or as my odd, infrequent chastisement over at a certain literary organ intimates , interested in theorizing and rhetoric.  I'm interested in thinking about how it is that the terms we use and the precepts we embrace shape our ability to understand ourselves, the world, and the interface between the two.  And here in this first tension we have a wonderful example of the sort of thing that fascinates me - an entire system of assumptions about the workings of time and historical passage and a certain sense of political nowness and it's placment within pragmatic political work.  Whatever one might think of my playful remarks about historical blindness and confounding factors, or whatever validity there might be to the narratives I fancifully trotted out above, let's face it, if we don't come to grips with what in the world we think of as historical time, there will never be a way out of this impasse.

So let me begin with an invitation.  Scott, as the flag bearer and champion of the con position under discussion, give it to us.  How does history work for you?  What are the contours of historical time?  I'll preemptively offer mine.  Time, historical time is, as Derrida notes, out of joint.  It is disconnected, its narratives the product of our own retrospective imaginations and not an inexorable flow from event unto event.  What we see as continuity is in fact a potlatch of - Benjamin's word here - catastrophes, fleeting images that pass us by and that we far too often attempt routinize and contain through the imposition of historical continuity.  Given this belief, I am entirely unconcerned that movement "whatever" fails to achieve its intended goals.  The New Left wanted to revolutionize politics, and I suppose that didn't happen, at least not how they wanted it.  But I could give a fried rat's ass about their goals' historical manifestation.  I care about the articulation of those goals, about what the moment of their invention and the nature of their pursuit tells us about the possibilities for invention, for the promulgation of the (we'll get there in a bit) political imaginary.  Is there another, reasonable way to interpret history?  Is National Socialism to be dismissed as an historical failure because it was eventually defeated?  An abhorrent political philosophy yes, but what does one gain by highlighting its failure as if such a thing would be, in and of itself, evidence of the poverty of its program?  Can one not recognize its enormous productivity, the force it had on history and that its program continues to exert on history?  By any sufficiently retrospective measure, every movement fails (or else we would never return to the notion of a movement, which already presupposes a to and a from, a here and a there, an achievement and a failure).  The relationship between the passage of time and the establishment of stated goals tells us jack-taco about the operational success or failure of a movement.  Or at least it pretends to do so at a cost: the impoverishment of alternative historical metrics, and a particularly poor appreciation for the role that language/discourse/rhetoric play in the formation of social and political identity.

That's my gloss on historical time.  I'm open.  I could be wrong about it.  I could be missing something.  Perhaps you even agree with me, but see your arguments predicated on a different, more nuanced reading?  I don't know.  But at least I feel like time is the first topic around which we should be orienting the discussion.  Or perhaps you know better?  Perhaps it is better for us to think through allegories predicated on the toys of yesteryear, I don't know.  Of course, I'm writing as a contributor for a place constantly awaiting monday, a plac thus constantly focused on time's precarious insufferance, and perhaps I just don't get the literary part of those from a more literary organ, and the allure of the allegory thus escapes me. 

Though I doubt it.

The second tension is born of a far too casual distrust/use of the symbolic.   Symbolic politics!  As if there is, ever strictly speaking, some other type.   Let's return to the National Socialists, one of the most ruthlessly pragmatic political organizations in modern history, a group that also knew that politics through and through were entirely symbolic.  Kenneth Burke's discussion of Mein Kampf, Frederic Spott's fascinating look at Hitler's obsession with aesthetics, and so on - if one needs "historical" evidence/discussion to this effect.  Are we to say that the early days of the Nazi party, before they figured out the sort of strategies needed to get them into power (agrarian populism worked, urban populism didn't), weren't fundamentally important, weren't indeed constitutive of the rhetorical force with which they eventually achieved dominance?  Would we say that the rise of the modern right in America is thinkable in the absence of the billions of dollars pumped into thinktanks designed to spread the word about the inherent rightness/soundness of conservative ideology, and do so even without specific policy recommendations? 

I read Acephalous quite a bit, as your referrer logs will no doubt show, and I stop by the Valve to see what's going on there with John and Rich and the gang.  And I tend to think that what we have here are lots of smart people with differences of opinion, and as you are one of those very smart people, I find it almost unfathomable that you would even type the phrase "purely symbolic" as if such a state might be possible.  As if such a purity might be possible.  You've backed off the use of purely as a modal qualifier a bit in subsequent comments on the subject, and indeed, it seems as if the tenor and nature of the discussion has shifted into disagreements no longer about the efficacy of the New Left, but I think that this question of efficacy is important.  And I think that it is a question that can only be resolved if we interrogate what it is we might mean by the symbolic in relation to politics, since I think we all know (following Murray Edelman, if we might site just one prominent scholar of political communication), that there can be no politics in the absence of the spectacular, the absence of the symbolic. So a few hypotheses.

1. Symbolic means "empty or insubstantial."  I think that charitably, this is what you were trying to imply.  What good is theatre when the theatre is explicitly tied to not participating in the political institutions by which substantive policy is done?  I can sympathize with this concern - to an extent.  After all, as someone who thinks that Foucault's quasi-ethical care of the self follows perhaps all too easily from his earlier emphasis on micropolitical resistance, and as someone who agrees very heavily with Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, and who has, in the past, run websites entirely devoted to progressive politics, I am entirely open to the possibility that perhaps these expansions or retreatings of the political are in fact retreats in the more obvious sense of the term.  But I also know - and here I think we learn much from Agamben and Nancy - that the human is not purely a political animal, that there must be a way of thinking politics that does not make of every activity a demand for political imbrication with the law or state.  This is the space typically thought under the rubric of ethics or morality, and it's important, not because it opposes the state per se, but rather because it opposes the requirement that one think only from the confines of the state.  From the perspective of substance, then, I find myself recoiling, almost violently, from any notion that would define symbolic substance by its relation to the state, and that would eschew as insubstantial or empty or even non-political any work that attempted to play with the thinking of the state itself.  The discussions of the politics of power, which are highlighted in comments by Charles and Angela, is an explicit rejoinder to this idea of symbolic as insubstantial, since the belief in the symbolic's productive/pragmatic emptiness is functionally a concession that the structure of power is not up for political consideration.  I addressed this one to a "you" that is Scott, but I think I can end that practice now.
2. Symbolic means ambivalence.  Let's for a second agree with Baudrillard about the fundamental insolvency of the symbolic, its ability to disrupt systems of signification by asserting a system of valences that cannot be resolved through recourse to a signified.  I am no longer addressing Scott here, as I think that there's no way one can see this reading of the symbolic in what he writes, but I think it's worth some consideration in that it offers something like a reversal of the operation.  It is as if we might say the the value of the New Left, of SDS, might be that it is indeed purely symbolic, a disruption to political signification.  These sorts of disruptions have historical precursors, and often particularly good outcomes, since they leave the government, which remains democratic in myth if not in function still yearning for some level of popular interest.  So, the argument goes, it's actually quite productive that many remain politically apathetic, because political engagement in a systemt hat entertains the structural possibility of only two major political options is a game of mutual exhaustion, where affirmation fights negation to a relative standstill and the government is generally more restrained than it could be if it could demonstrate that everyone cared one way or the other.  Here, the argument goes, it's not whether you're left or right but whether or not you're engaged in the struggle at all, a struggle that will exhaust both sides (with minor wins here and there, largely based on a pendulum theory of political socialization).  So the symbolic as ambivalence isn't just one strategy by which those opposed to government power might operate, it is the fundamental predicate by which governmentality is restrained.
3. Symbolic as supplement.  The problem with the previous two options is that both of them rest on an ontological precept that seems to me unsupportable: namely, that investment exhausts an individual's finite energy.  That there is, to put it another way, a scarcity of political agency, and that one must use their energies in a way that maximizes their potential or that at least avoids their exhaustion.  When Socrates explains that an individual can be expert in only one thing, just as an ant can only accomplish one task, well I think we all let out the same guffaw at the stupidity of the claim and the insipid nature of the analogy.  Clearly we have the capacity to do both, or else one could not, in the midst of all the other fictions and theories and movies and sports, engage with the political, and this discussion would never happen.  So perhaps it behooves us to think of the symbolic as the supplement in a Derridean sense, a supplement that is indeed constitutive of the thing it purports to be extraneous to.  Trying to separate the political from the symbolic then would be a fool's errand, likely with very dangerous consequences (and I suspect this is true if the separation attempted is either "material" or "theoretical", precisely because of the relation of the two).  Using different terminology, Derrida says as much in Politics of Friendship:

   Now what would a 'history', a science, or a historical action purporting to be resolutely and ingeniously extradiscursive or extratextual actually do?  What would a political history or philosophy, at least realistic, in truth do, if they did not assume all the disquieting conversions...  What else could they do without attempting to read all the apparently contradictory impossibles that these 'sophisticated discourses' impose on our memory?  Let us answer: they could do little, almost nothing.  They would miss the hardest, the most resistant, the most irreducible, the othermost of the 'thing itself.'  Such a political history of philosophy would deck itself out in 'realism' just in time to fall short of the thing - and to repeat, repeat and repeat again, with neither consciousness nor memory of its compulsive droning.

   Of course, if the sybolic is (a poor word choice, but whatever:) "merely" supplemental, then there's almost no reason for the debate, and those lauding SDS and those maligning SDS are equally wrong, or at least equally caught up in something that is inexorable, and so hardly worth contesting.  Unless of course the debate is over the valences assigned to and not the practices of the New Left.  Which is, I suppose, once you eliminate all the other random issues involve, perhaps what this debate is about.  Indirectly. 

But what's been going on here isn't then a debate over the nature of the symbolic; this is a debate over the imaginary.  Charles Taylor, certainly not beholden to any psychoanalytic conception of the term, nevertheless describes the imaginary in ways resonant with (though not identical to) Lacan.  Taylor's "social imaginary" is "the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations."  As with the social, so homologously with the political: a specular association of words and associations, of ideographs and of envisioned political reality.  It seems to me that recent snapshots of the Left suffer from a lack of just this sort of speculative imagination, and that the Right has it in spades.  This is an imaginary that I think can only be benefited by the revival of SDS and similar political theatre, in that it sparks the possibility of something other than politics as is, and because I think that the alternative, which privileges political operation over demarcations scene and productions of motivation.  To win implies the winning of something, and the left appears to have very little on the speculative horizon.  If a New Left implies an even remote chance of building something that might dot that distant political skyline, or they can just play with looking at different altitudes, it seems to me to be something to be welcomed.  Perhaps cautiously, perhaps eagerly.  As something to come, that must come, for the Left to even know when it is that its pragmatic political operations have achieved something like a victory.  The New Left then is neither a withdrawal nor a revolution, it is the political in a very strict sense, and it is pragmatism - the concept of a pure pragmatism - that marks the scene of an escape, of a concession, and a retreat.