Thursday, April 27, 2006
(8:25 AM) | Anonymous:
Make American Public Life Say “Mayday” (¿que hora son en Washington?)
In a recent thread on abortion, the question emerged (quite tangentially) of the “American public life.” I would like to propose a thesis: American public life, even in a redeemed state, ought to be the enemy.The organization of a public in the USA is already much less than anything that might enter into the society of a properly Gramscian or Althusserian equation. First, there is no party which provides a subjective intervention for the march through institutions. Second, the public, in the USA, has always underwritten a capitalist solution to the problems of labor and race. It is enough here to say: New Deal, Great Society, Civil Rights. These have never been mediations of antagonism. They have been nothing other than antagonistic strategies mobilized against insurgent or potentially insurgent elements in American society.
Of course, today we stand after the demise of any benefits made available by these strategies. We are in the age of Bush and of Fox News. Any attempt to counter this age through a public can, at best, reinstate something like the above projects’ control of insurgent elements. In my mind, the organs for such a public are already in place: New York Times, hybrid cars, Bono, Jon Stewart, Wes Anderson, Death Cab for Cutie, cultural studies, allergies to Bush. (A paradigmatic example: at the recent, NYTimes-sponsored documentary film fest in Durham, NC, the “focus” was on “social justice” and Katrina-victims, yet some of my non-white friends were harassed by the kind-hearted liberal volunteers.)
On one side, then, Bush, the Christian Coalition, etc; on the other, responsible consumption, individualistic expressions of dissatisfaction with and concern about Bush and his policies. What the American public has, at best, is the hippie Daria (in Zabriskie Point) who grooves to her music and works in the suburban developer’s office; what it cannot have is the Daria who wills that the office be destroyed in a fiery explosion. Isn’t the former Daria a counterrevolutionary subjectification of Seattle and Genoa? What emerged in these events has been displaced and captured. The displacement must be taken up and revolutionized. The Zapatistas, perhaps the symbol of Seattle and Genoa, have done this: no longer allowing themselves to be subjected to the discourse of indigenous rights, they have assumed the task of taking the territory of Mexico (“from below,” to be sure) and making a new constitution.
Which brings us to Mayday 2006… There is another American history, one driven by an immigrant exodus and by peoples who, sedimented against their own will, resist the relation to the land they are offered. The only America worth naming is the one named by their convergence. The Africans, Indians, and immigrants precede the public America. All of them were already here. What is necessary is an act of remembrance which is also a creation of the present. We need to forget the Civil War and remember Nat Turner, forget civil rights and remember the Black Panthers, forget the virgin frontier and remember the American Indian Movement. The only way to begin fighting the American and Israeli alliance is to think about what Deleuze and Elias Sanbar called the “Palestinian Indians.” As Deleuze said elsewhere, “Was there ever a Palestinian people? Israel says no. Of course there was, but that’s not the point. The thing is, that once the Palestinians have been thrown out of their territory, then to the extent that they resist they enter the process of constituting a people.” Indeed, we now need to remember the origins of Mayday, the antagonism of immigrant workers in Chicago, at the same time that we act as immigrant workers in the present. In which case the “we” would not be the same. Every attempt will be made to turn the issue of immigration into a public question. But it is not. Before the public, there are minor, bastard, nondenumerable people. The task is to create the common name of such a people.
