To begin again - this is the fetish of the academic year. I love beginnings since they promise much and bristle with expectation, hope and the promise of ideal outcomes. As terms start all over the Northern hemisphere, the possibility of less mess, of more constructive finishing, more focus and less hubris, is all over us. Yes we are anxious and worked up and hellishly worn out by the run into it all, but it does allow for a radicalising possibility that I want to try to seize as politically productive...
First the obstacles:
Yet, in the UK, there has been much in the news recently about corruption, back-handed deals and anonymous tip-offs and leaks to the press, all attaching themselves to our beleaguered Labour government and Tony Blair in particular. In the meantime, the shiny 'new' Tories go from strength to strength in the poles and Cameron's charm offensive begins to look startlingly familiar: Blair by another name, just as, in the run up to 1997, the Major government seemed hopelessly lost and weighed down by sleaze and infighting.
What is striking in the media's coverage of it all, though, is the perennial persistence not just of conspiracy theory, but also a certain intensification of the idea that humane and decent government might no loner even possible at all, ever. In he UK, as in other Anglophone countries (with the exception of Australia, for obvious reasons), the turnout at bi- and general elections continues to fall radically. One way to try to understand this, it seems to me, is to interrogate the discursive construction of 'apathy' as frame here: is 'apathy' something that follows political decline, or is it in some sense a proactive agent in the construction of a culture of political disengagement?
I don't pretend to have a simple answer here, but, it seems to me, the rise of the right, of a certain capitalist-fatalism, has, of course, meant that belief in change as "for the political good" has given way to a belief in change as a kind of open-ended sameness, a state of interminable uncertainty that will never go away: change has become sloganised, drawn into managerial patterns of social engagement such that it has become one of those words that crops up in the title of workshops and training sessions for middle-managers of the machine:
Coping with change
Change is good
How to manage change
and so on.
Now the analysis and, perhaps, even a solution?
I am, in a sense a nostalgic (to be left-wing in these times is always to be cast by the mainstream as in some sense ludicrous, atavistic, a dinosaur, part of 'Old Europe', perhaps), but I am also a radical nostalgic. I have never let go of the idea that government, for example, ought to take constant account of its mandate, ought to fear its citizens and ought to be ready at any moment to flea from office in order to make way for a different way of seeing the world. As Zizek puts it, being left-wing now, is to be one who bears witness to the continuity, despite the ridicule one thereby attracts, of ideas of social justice, fairness and radical democracy (at home, in the workplace, in government and so on).
They sound like soundbites, but they must be said, thought and enacted. If apathy is anything other than simple, as the Greek would have it 'a state of being without passion', then he question remains now as to how to engage that 'passion' on he left again. The right has always been well versed at this and has always understood that passion can motivate and shape a populace, a political engine, very effectively. The left has always in some sense been frightened of this notion - that passion might, in the end, be what makes politics real, makes it come to life, tumble into the outside, the Real. For many of us, this notion seems like a kind of shamanism, a triumph of charisma over content, of personality over policy.
But perhaps there may yet be a way to flick that switch again, to make this notion (that indignation at injustice might motor a political change) again seem viable, and far from ludicrous.
Plans of action, then, usually involve a number of starting points, and I think the best any left-wing theory of change that does not succumb to the charm of its own narrative can do is to incubate the possibility of thinking other then the norm, to, as I heard it put recently by Haleh Afshar, to 'put the norm somewhere else'.
I like this idea, not least because it allows for intervention not as simply as a kind of mindless passage a l'acte, but as a way of challenging the paradigm, of reinvigorating the possibility of agency (however laminated, sedimented, distributed).
So the flicking of the switch might come from a decent plan, a decent and well-formed strategy which balances pragmatics with principle, structure with the particular. It is, I suggest, in the attention to how we engage the world, how we reproduce it, how we make it again and again and encourage our students to do the same, that a radical politics of political engagement might once again become the norm, and 'put somewhere else'.
Here, then, is my plan:
to engage this and other public domains in radicalising and interventionist moves
to work even harder than I already do, to proliferate the intellectual tools for thinking radically and actively
to engage at every micro-social moment as always already political, and to refuse the separating out of political and personal
to think and to act as in one instance
to network and make connections that intensify this action's effectiveness
to intervene again and again
The place where this will start is my place of work: I teach and this is my life. I will teach then with this in mind always.
Now we begin.
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