<nettime> The imaginary institution of society

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Has anyone been on the streets in France these last days? Does anyone have
some insight as to what is going on there?

I wish I could see inside the heads and hearts of the people who burnt the
town hall in Limoges. I'm fine with the town hall going down but the
question is, How do they plan to organize society amid its ashes? My
impression is that this kind of protest has turned to nihilism -
 understandably so. Still the idea that you can just tear down the state
and something better will replace it is dubious to say the least. In the
absence of a left alternative, what you will get from burning town halls is
a fascist police state. We have a strong beginning of that in the US, it's
ugly and frightful and it's amazing how little effective opposition there
is. I am also curious whether Jean-Luc Melenchon's communist party, France
Unbowed, is putting up a viable alternative. Melenchon says the left 'must
refuse to take part in actions without political meaning and contrary to
our methods.' Because he knows exactly where this kind of thing leads.

Yesterday I watched a great film, The Forest in the City, which is about
the attempt by all kinds of people in Atlanta, Georgia, to stop the
installation of a giant new police training facility, paid for by the city
itself (one third) and by a consortium of private corporations (two
thirds). Great film, but the attempt to stop "Cop City" was a failure.
Following the initial clashes with forest defenders, including the outright
murder of one of them - Tortuguita - grassroots social movements in the
city got over 100.000 signatures to put a referendum about the facility up
for a vote. The city simply refused to count those signatures. The big
corporations like Bank of America, Coca Cola, UPS and Home Depot, they got
what they paid for: cops who shoot to kill. The last stand of the forest
defenders ended in RICO conspiracy charges brought by the Georgia Attorney
General against 61 defendants. Those charges were finally thrown out by a
judge who concluded they were invalid - they did not follow Georgia law,
which would have required the Governor's authority. Unfortunately this
decision, two years too late, doesn't change anything in the big picture -
while the AG's office arbitrarily made its own law, the movement was
crushed and Cop City was built. The forest defenders and the referendum
activists failed because there was no larger civil-society opposition to
the corporate state. It's no wonder people become nihilistic. They have no
other choice.

How to elicit a really broad cross-class cross-race opposition to
oligarchical capitalism? Doesn't it need a workable vision of a just
society? Is such a vision even possible today? I really doubt that French
society is ready for Tarnac everywhere, that is, self-managed communes in
the countryside and mega-squats in the cities. Nor was the US ready for the
visions produced by the George Floyd movement, of which police and prison
abolition was the best - but totally unworkable, in the short term at
least. The propaganda of the deed is one big dead end. Yet in both France
and the US there are definitely people who can see beyond the burning cars,
to focus on the legitimate demands of youth, minorities and impoverished
workers. Is there any way to produce viable social visions amid these
uprisings? Are there subjectivizing processes that could lead to a new,
more just and more stable society? Who would be able to promote and realize
such visions? How are they doing it?

I remember very clearly when Cornelius Castoriadis published La montee de
l'insignifiance (The Rising Tide of Insignificance) in 1996. The title
shocked everyone. There were interviews on TV and whatnot. Looking over the
table of contents today, one essay jumps out: "The Crisis of the
Identification Process." People are no longer able to identify with the
imaginary of their society, that is, with *the representations that society
produces of itself.* In France that imaginary is currently embodied by the
image of Macron against a white-and-gold background, it's the Start-up
Nation, it's rich fucks with their luxury shops on the Champs-Elysées and
it's hipsters with their cafes and consumer fetishes sitting on expensive
real estate in opulent cities that half the country can't afford to even
visit anymore. A majority cannot identify with that, it's a neoliberal
abomination. But what happens to the person who can't identify with any
aspect of the existing society? They lash out, of course. Or maybe they
become withdrawn and catatonic, or cult followers, or most likely of all,
fascists clinging to imaginaries of the distant past.

Castoriadis thinks that Western societies in the 19th and 20th centuries
had a self-contradictory and therefore dynamic self-image: founded
simultaneously on the capitalist desire for mastery (science, technology,
markets, domination) and the enlightenment desire for autonomy (the
workers' movement, public education, participatory democracy). Cut the
democratic part off and you are left with the dominant and the dominated.
What can the dominated identify with? Only some very partial representation
of society - maybe a religious cult, or a racial or gender identification,
or just an us-and-them story, a conspiracy theory. It's not easy to survive
as a splinter group. You have to continually validate yourself against
everything you can hear or see. Eventually the splinter pierces you. You
can go insane if you're not careful.

If you're a cultural producer, and therefore involved with producing those
imaginary images, those partial self-representations of some kind of viable
society, then the question becomes urgent. What kind of identification -
what kind of subjectivizing process - do your images induce? If you examine
most current cultural production, you will find it contributes almost
nothing to a potentially viable self-image of society. But if yours does,
bravo, you're ready for the second challenge: How can a partial
identification produce anything more than an illusion or a cult or a
nihilistic black bloc? People in Atlanta, over a hundred thousand people,
did their best to transform the Cop City occupation, with all its violent
clashes and sabotage, into the positive choice of a forest park over a
militarized control center. And the occupiers themselves asked for nothing
more. In return they were disdained, silenced, crushed, even killed.
Apparently the middle classes opted for Bank of America and Coca-Cola.
Under today's conditions, that's clearly the fascist option.

We need visions of radical transformation, able to benefit entire
populations. And we need ways of preserving and sharing those visions,
those partial identifications with the image of a not-yet existing society.
We need strategies for keeping alternative images alive under repressive
conditions, and also, for increasing their capacity to reach out and
convince others who do not immediately share our own values and desires.
Dead-end radicalism paves the royal road to fascism. It's time to reinvent
leftist culture.
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