Finding Mem(e)o

While the Occupy Wall Street Movements have been very successful at using innovative new cyber campaigning efforts, I think the image above illustrates part of why I reserve a certain degree of cynical distance toward the movement. Nonetheless, I am still hopeful that another world is possible, indeed, another world is here.

Antonio from Mediacology has an interesting new post about the resilience of the Occupy Wall Street movements. Although large media syndicates have barraged publics with accusations that the movements is a bunch of rabble rousing, mobs engaged in class warfare masquerading as social justice.  Antonio describes the complex and uncertain effects of the circulation of memes;

A meme works when it taps into a zeitgeist. It’s a flame that ignites, but doesn’t necessarily replicate exactly in the same form every time. It’s like an utterance that echoes and reverberates through resonance. It doesn’t exist as a thing but as part of an ongoing conversation. Few need a college degree to apprehend the depth of catastrophe the current economic model has become. By establishing contact zones with the awareness that something needs to be done, these occupations become apertures for an emergent reality that contests the delusional dreamworld propagated by the corporate media.

Memes exist at the intersection of several thresholds. They are not simply quotes, utterances of discourse, images or emotions alone in themselves. They bring an affective force that previously existed below the level of visibility to the surface. Almost ex nihilo they erupt and make manifest the collective sentiment and valence of a specific cultural phenomena.

Yes both the left and the right can offer analyses and provide figures explaining the crisis away. They likewise can both demonize and caricature public figures across the aisle. But neither of them can tap into that deep affective force without the spontaneous convergence of cognitive content, image and affect that is synthesized in the meme. While memes are often of comedic content, their truth value inevitably bleeds through and drives their circulation if they are to be of any force at all.

So how exactly has the movement sustained itself despite the vitriol of claims otherwise? Or the constant feedback loops of Herman Cain proclaiming the protests are the result of those conspiring to keep Obama elected.

One thing I can agree with Newt Gingrich on is that these protests are the result of a bad education system producing dumb ideas. The recent Texas Education Reform debacle probably proves that when you exclude the histories of struggle, such as Cezar Chavez, the Gay Rights Movement, and the like, and replace them with unquestioned theological foundations for American Exceptionalism people are dumbfounded when events like the 2008 economic collapse occur. 

Si(g)n(e) Die

New Video from Occupy Wall Street, signs of a new beginning?

Sign Language

 

Nate Silver from fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com has an interesting new post about the dynamics of mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall St Movements. He analyzes information provided by the database NewsLibrary.com that indicates there was relatively little coverage of the protests until they provoked police response. The Protests which began originally on September 17 began with mainly local media responses from traditional mediums.  There was a significant surge when the police were caught on tape pepper spraying dissidents. A larger trend began to manifest itself in which clashes with police provoked proportional surges in media coverage.

Occupying the Middle at the Fringes

As the Occupation movements spread across the U.S. to different cities interesting geographies of protest have emerged. The movements in Dallas, Texas provide a poignant case study. The movements have taken the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas as their symbolic point of attack, but they're late to the party, and something tells me that provisions of Tea will be served for refreshments.


Ron Paulians, Tea Partyers, End the Fed-ers, and A.M. Talk Radio Fans have been rallying against the Fed for years. Now that there is a larger contingent of people protesting the Fed there has been an interesting convergence between the New New Left and the Far Right. The Fed's always possessed  enigmatic affective traces, but now it will be stuck with mutually reinforcing associations from both sides.

The resonance and alliance of right and left provokes a paradoxical moment for protesters on both ends. When you have Rush Limbaugh and Ron Paul leading side-by-side with Cornel West and Slavoj Zizek how can any outcome be predicted? The uncertainty and complexity of the situation is awe inspiring. The proliferation of interpretations, passionate displays of angst, and rationalizations for the status quo and its supplementary resistance has made for quite a potent political cocktail. The question is will the more mild public drink it down or humbly choose to abstain?


Zizek recently spoke to the Occupy Wall St. movement, #OWS, at Liberty Park. He encouraged the group but also offered a few pieces of pointed criticism.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

He ended with a simple injunction to not just desire but actually want the other world that is possible;

We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.

He also told the groups that they should not paint the far right and the Tea Partyers as enemies. His basic point was that even if they are stupid, they should be on the left and so the movement should reach out rather than alienate such publics. His speech offered some tactical pieces of advice for the movement as it continues to unfold. He told the group to focus on the systemic totality not on individuals or abstract claims about greed, to reclaim family values and religion as better represented by the left, and to fight for 'the commons' not communism as such.

What are the implications for such a shift in leftist appeals? Can such traditional values be affectively recoded in a surge of emotional appeals and attacks on systemic violence? Or will it take something more? What is the role of media in these new protests? I will try to explore some of these questions more as the movement continues to develop and their strategy manifests itself in relation to more specific value questions rather than just the economy in the abstract.

Occupy Austin and the Idle Talk of ‘the they’

In relation to the ongoing Occupation movements I’ve been split in terms of whether I have hope in them, identify with them or simply let sputter out unnoticed. Initially I thought they were rather novel and if they gained enough inertia they could potentially lead to mass strikes that could reinvigorate organized labor. But as I began to look into the demography of the movements, the landscape appears to be characterized more by trustafarians playing hacky sack and drinking micro-brews. Even the recent campus movements that chant “we’re the 99%” seem somewhat ridiculous to me. Yes you are the 99% but most likely if you’re attending this university you’re the top 10% of the country, and top 1% of the world.

In a lot of ways, the movement has been somewhat self-aggrandizing in many senses. I understand it is decentralized and leaderless, and thus is may be wrong to make sweeping generalizations, nonetheless I think writ large what is being produced will end up remaining unorganized and position-less. It comes off as an outburst of populism, not a tangible political force. I think the result is that either politicians will pander to and co-opt them, and van Jones has already attempted to do just that, or the movement will refuse the influence and they will drift into obscurity. Transforming a moment of potentiality into a nullity.

There are those that proffer broad based class critique, [and I say critique instead of ‘warfare’ because this is nothing like ‘warfare,’ just watch the Brooklyn balloon resistance] but its typically aimed at scapegoating ceo’s rather than the totality. Then there are those that criticize ‘the system’ yet the response they seek to garner is simply a reinstatement of the unemployed. More taxes, less bread!

In my previous post I indicated that I would not be reducing my analysis to class critique and that I would engage in a more phenomenological approach. In Sein und Zeit in The everyday being of the “there,” and the Falling of Dasein section Heidegger writes

Our interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein, and from the aspirations of a ‘philosophy of culture’ (SuZ, 210).

Likewise, my interpretation of these movements does not come as a distanced recluse rather I went and observed the movements first hand the last couple of days. I may be somewhat more moralistic than Heidegger in tenor, but will attempt to use the phenomenological analysis as a jumping off point for questioning the effects, modes, and genuineness of the movements as a thing in and of themselves.

Yesterday when I went to the pre-rally on the main mall of the University of Texas at Austin I spoke with Professor Miller (I hate sharing my last name with this guy) of the McCombs Business School. He was talking to some of the protesters and a journalist from the Daily Texan. After pontificating about the ills of government regulation his basic point was that ‘these kids’ need to quit ‘complaining’ and start coming up with incentive based solutions to the market. One of the things that sparked this post however was a comment he made that these protests simply get people to join on board something without understanding the ‘back story’ of the situation. Basically that the protests make people unreflectively bandwagon onto a movement they are ignorant about.

At the time I quickly retorted that symbolic protests are not public policy forums and that his argument was generally more characteristic of the right than the left, and that this is simply a response to the rhetorical branding that’s worked so well since the Gingrich revolution. On further reflection after watching the protests evolve in person and online, and seeing the media’s coverage of the movements it seems he might have had a decent point after all.

Heidegger produces the idea of Idle Talk as a mode of Dasein’s average everydayness. It’s not that Idle Talk is more or less present-at-hand as a mode of discourse than others, it points to the ways that this mode can only come from the sort of Being that has disclosedness as a necessary and essential aspect of its existence. Heidegger’s definition,

The Being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement [Ausspruch]-all these now stand surety for the genuineness of the discourse and of the understanding which belongs to it, and for its appropriateness to the facts. And because this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship, it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along. What is said-in-the-talk as such, spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative characters. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along- a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness (SuZ, 212, emphasis original).

Idle talk is a people magazine, shooting the breeze, speaking without ground. What’s interesting here is not just a basic description of people talking without either being sincere or having acquired a level of expertise to do so but rather the analysis of the ways in which Idle Talk lends itself to circulation. Idle Talk as a mode of communication is more apt to circulate because its very nature implies that lack of ontological questioning; things can simply be taken on face. This precludes a search for the grounds upon which the discourse is spoken from, it is a part of the larger forces of nihilism in which the Being of beings that speaks is forgotten. The type of entities that language possesses is likewise forgotten, concealed, and covered over. Heidegger writes;

The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer (SuZ, 213).

Idle Talk circulates throughout the public because of its simple reductive ‘truth’ value. Things don’t have truth for a specific Being as the result of making it their own through ontological reflection, rather things are because ‘they’ have said so. The desire for understanding pure and simple obscures the necessity for inquiry,

The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want any such distinction, and does not need it, because, of course, it understands everything (SuZ, 212, emphasis original). 

This is what upsets me about the Occupation movements. Its not that I want to see these people engaged in riveting dialectical materialist analyses that would rival Marx or Harvey today, but I think the lack of anything resembling a coherent message points to the fact that the movement embraces an anything goes sort of mentality. Everyone’s sign is just fine. There aren’t any internal tensions being exposed. I understand the left has been plagued by in-fighting for far too long and a generous disposition of alliance is strategic, but to what end? Its probably more strategic to create some sort of signifying point at which the criticism crystallizes. I understand it’s a movement against Wall Street, but does capitalism really have a center? It will always be more dispersed and decentralized than your movement, how successful can mimicry be?

Heidegger puts it best,

Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone….Because of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back (SuZ, 213)

Idle talk as a modality of communication cuts off and closes down. It seeks to shelter being from agonistic engagement. For movements to be successful they need to be more aggressive and explicity. This movement is nothing like the Battle for Seattle or the Arab Spring. There is no attempt to disrupt the flow of goods, traffic, or people. Simple chanting and cheering may ‘speak truth to power’ but it won’t redirect the power relationships.

The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood-that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world “matter” to it. The “they” prescribes on’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’ (SuZ, 213).

Thus my critique is not aimed at tweaking or reforming a bit of the content within the movement writ large, but rather to expose the ways that the general disposition of the movement in terms of the way it inculcates a mood of critique and movement is problematic. It enframes the complex flows of global capitalism and the populist energy of America into neat easily understood and thus subverted forces. This obscures the contradictions of capital rather than searching for breaking points. It assumes single individuals are evil, rather than attempting to smash the oppressor within. It views capital as a disembodied structure rather than one that operates moreso on the ability to reproduce the relations of production by commodifying the sensorium, our musculature, emotive tendencies and perceptual capacities.

When Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is – as Being-in-the-world – cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the world, with Others, and towards itself (SuZ 214).

This general mood cuts off our capacities to care for the Other’s we are speaking about and for more generally. The desire for completely intelligible system of capitalism and the arrogance it breeds cultivates a general cynicism that fails to see the objectifying processes within the everyday. Capital does not exist solely as an invisible structure that occurs behind the closed doors of the New York Stock Exchange its refracted through our movements, modes of speaking, and friend and family interactions. Until greater attention is paid to the minutiae of everyday biopolitical processes, than the reversal of such power relations will always remain a utopian, moralistic castle in the sky.

While the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter (SuZ, 214)