I identified with the some of Jameson's views on postmodern feelings, or lack thereof. Jameson states, "As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well...That is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings...are now free floating and impersonal." I find this a suitable explanation for the current state of political activism among our youth.
I am an avid but largely passive follower of contemporary American politics. Almost every political event (ads, speeches, debates) is recorded and can be watched by any individual with a fast internet connection. Selected soundbites are replayed ad nauseam to those (e.g. me) who watch 24-hour news networks or Sunday morning political talkshows. While the culture of political blogs spreads rampantly, major student demonstrations are few and far between. I do not mean to belittle smaller protests such as the recent march for the Jena Six. However, even events that size are infrequent. I am speaking in comparison to my (,somewhat nostalgic perhaps,) understanding of the youth movements during the Vietnam era.
I find Jameson's postmodern rationale feasible. He identifies a definite lack of individual personality. This sheds some light on how the majority of a country can oppose a war but make no great displays of protest as it continues. Jameson alludes to our living in a synchronic instead of diachronic time. The popularity of high-speed internet makes this at least partially true. Around the world, we simultaneously express outrage in a collective webspace while sitting alone in our most comfortable desk chairs.
(Sorry for the angry sounding post)
1. Jameson doesn't just stop by diagnosing the 'problem of the people' that blankman has summarized (in much more accessible English than Mr. Jameson, might I add). He connects this 'waning of affect' with the seemingly insurmountability of this latest strain of late capitalism. Its depth, its comprehensive grasp on our every behavior threatens to render the average consumer/citizen politically void. The center is 'capitalism' and yet, there is no center. From pop culture to coffee, from sneakers to political campaigns, from cell phone providers to produce, resistance is paralyzed by extraordinary depth and dimension of postmodern systems of power. A power that is essentially decentralized. It seems that it is through 'technology,' argues Jameson, that we are able to imagine "a network of power and control [too]...diffilcut for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered gobal network of the third stage of captial itself" (p. 38). Which leades me to my second point...
2. It's interesting that blankman feels that mass, isolated, cell-like digital resistance does not signify any kind of resistance akin to that of the Vietnam era. I'm not sure where Jameson would stand on this issue, but I have to believe that he might think that a 'movement in the streets' is not the kind of revolution that is going to shake the current state of multinational capitalistm. Let me explain:
Some have argued (apologies for lack of citation) that physical world demonstration (ie: marches, sit-ins, etc.) are no longer the most truly subversive forms of sociopolitical resistance. In the middle of the 20th Century, mass street movements had never existed with such fervence in the U.S. Thus when thousands of students skipped class to march against the Vietnam War, people dropped their jaws and listened. But today, we wonder, 'Why aren't there students in the streets?' But peaceful street demonstration is protected as an inalienable right in our lovely nation's list of promises to its citizens. And in the post-Civil Rights era, street protest is an anticipated outcome of social discourse; it is the way we are SUPPOSED to patricipate in civil engagement. It doesn't challenge the 'order;' on the contrary, it justifies and reinforces by taking part.
In this line of thought, it follows that cyberspace is the new venue for profound and subversive political acts to take place. Acts that cannot be so easily institutionalized and memorialized into pop history. Acts that threaten the framework of the capitalist-bound intensions of the internet. If the Internet is the ultimate tool of defense (in that information is not maintained in any single central hub, but continuously passed along through interconnected cells), the challenge is greater but so are the possibilties for powerful impact. Anyone can learn how to get in. Just ask a hacker.
The question then turns back to the image of thousands of isolated, atomized postmodern subjects, typing away at their computers, collecting in virtual spaces to fashion critical resistance, but all the while still sitting alonge and lonely in the physical world. Certainly we are fragmented, broken apart, as Jameson suggests. But we are also perhaps working in the only subversive ways we can. Must we succumb to the atomized schyzophrenic experience in order to retreive any sense of true community? Is the digital community the answer? Is it worth the physical disconnect?
Wheew, too many of my words. I'm interested to hear other peoples' thoughts on this...
I think Anonymous is absolutely right that popular discourses lamenting the loss of "in the streets" action end up circumscribing resistance in disadvantageous ways for people interested in systemic change. The question of digital community, and particularly whether or not it's "enough," is one with which I constantly grapple. I like to envision a more sufficiently hybridized world in which we could have physical connection and simultaneously harness the incredible communitarian possibilities of the digital. Burgeoning interfaces for *genuine* online communities make me optimistic in a cautious, qualified way, but optimistic nonetheless. I think it's imperative for revolutionary politics to maintain an outlook of non-totalizing Utopianism. Easy as it is to denigrate ("it's just the capitalist atomization of life being more fully realized" kind of narratives), for me the Internet presents a compelling venue for radical politics; one whose potential is just beginning to be understood and utilized with the development of web 2.0.
I think that blankman's selected quote is very accurate to our society today. I am glad that Jameson made the distinction that it is not that the feelings are gone, but rather, made numb and desensitized. As our world becomes increasingly concentric around the media, images, and intertextuality, meaning is gradually lost altogether along with their true feelings. I mean a loss of 'true feelings' in the sense that all these factors are now misunderstood because their meanings are formulated on a lack of real understanding of the history and truth as they become more based on media representation and pastiche.
Anonymous,
I think that you make a great point in saying that because a physical demonstration in public has become part of the dominant subscription to social and political problems, it can no longer be a radical form of disruption.
However, I am still skeptical about the idea that our new space for protest in this age is the internet. My biggest issue with this is that I see political discussion on the internet more in terms of a catharsis rather than action. In the 1960s, the average student was skipping class to join march in protest. In the new millennium, the average student is joining a Facebook group in solidarity with those in Darfur or in opposition to the war in Iraq. Now, I would hardly call FB a genuine political community, but the point is that this is what the average student is doing.
When the purpose of these cyber communities turns from dialogue and activism, to relieving one's conscience because one has joined a group called "I will donate X amount for every x amount of memebrs in this groups...etc etc", I maintain a pessimist view that cyber-communities in their most mainstream forms aren't enough for social change.
Well put, Maraudingcat. I often feel as though the "facebook activism" paradigm not only obscures *genuine* political engagement, it actually represents an insidious kind of depoliticization. Such movements (if we can even justifiably refer to them as such) cast geopolitical issues such as genocide, disease prevention, and economic re-adjustment in purely humanitarian terms - as if sending off shipments of money and/or supplies and "raising awareness" would magically dissipate systematized oppression. That said, one discursive struggle of mine is to discursively re-politicize phenomena such as genocide. I'm sick of hearing about poor African people without any analysis of the intersecting social, political, and econimic mechanisms at play, the historicity of colonialism, the overtly racialized aspects of anti-genocide narratives - the list goes on and on. Let's put the cheap rhetoric to bed.