The Phantom Left

Chris Hedges discusses the specter of the American Liberal class in the new century, or what he calls the Phantom Left, that exists perhaps, but outside of public discourse. What I mean is, the values of the radical Left, whether they have disappeared or remain only in the congregation of "elites," have become caricatured by both the Right-wing establishment and extremists, but also the Democrats, whose timidity (and let's add lethargy) can only be explained by their "selling out" to corporate interests. The most recent example is Comedy Central's rally to Restore Sanity, which conflated serious ideas with (sometimes) witty entertainment, politics with spectacle. What is needed, Hedges insists, is a return to the serious, radical organizing of the mid-twentieth century. It "would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state." It seems as though a Leftist dissent from partisan politics as usual is overdue. I agree with Hedges as much as I do with the Situationist critique he hearkens to, but with the populace generally absent from a serious commitment to self-informing scrutiny, cannot publicizing this view only further sever politics from spectacle, ideas from entertainment, further obfuscating (because purifying) the former? Isn't this election (and the Tea Party) evidence that power is still attained, and secured, by promoting collective anxiety, hysteria, and good ol' fashion ethnocentrism? I am the last one to stick up for popular anything, but even the elites understand that the public's lack of support for Healthcare reform is linked to this administration's evasion of transparency and articulation. In other words, Hedges gets why the Left is impotent, but I don't think he gets political efficacy. I personally wish there were a more vibrant, self-critical Left movement in the U.S., but my fear is that 1) it would breed the kind of mock-worthy antics and soundbites we hear from the Tea Party, and 2) if the majority of Americans cannot relate to the President (who most on the far-Left would call moderate), what makes us think that an intelligent, committed, purist Left would be any more understood? I don't have many of these answers, but I sit for now on the position that the moderate, entertainment-style Left of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is the our only current hope of political influence. Does it beckon the Corporatist sabotage-scheme into the spotlight? No. Will it take a few years for voters to see the detriment wrought upon our legislative and electoral processes by corporate interests? Probably.

The iconography of iconoclasts

Sans the self-diagnostic, ego coddling apology, let me share without apparent jealousy the pellucid [goddamnit] work of those [bastards] more avidly concerned than my[childishly neurotic!]self about this matter. I haven't located the last article cited (Wheeler's "Poetry, Mattering?"), but reading Golding's terrifically balanced exposition feels like showing up to your fifth grade science fair only to find another project strikingly familiar in content but surpassing in rhetorical execution, and a more expensive posterboard. Of course, that never did happen because, as the comic reality exists, even today, "80 percent of success is showing up." The problem in question involves a lot of upset people doing a lot of things to upset the complicitly normative way of writing by deriding the "easy" way and fostering new ways to mean, inevitably causing an upset for those used to art-as-usual, used for commodity and complicitly absorptive audiences, then those new ways getting understood, getting trendy, upsetting those who expected the anti-authoritarian, anti-academic icon-clasters not to seize the moment of institutional sponsorship and affluence, because it's upsetting to think of once radical figures and works assimilating into the unpreventable canon, inadvertently setting (authoritatively) preferred standards of taste and teaching objectives, ultimately requiring a new tide of upset detractors to upsettedly upset the upsetting consecration of purposely desecratively upset upsetters and their upsetting works. Is it wrong for intentionally obscure poets to explain? to be made accessible? Should we write them off as fraudulent anti -capitalists and begin the counter-revolutionary revolution? or haven't we learned that opposites are imaginary, and no serious "should" belongs in any radical invective.. wait, is this absolute? what do I mean? Do you see my reason for tentativeness? Am I being clear? you understand? Oh, I sure hope not.

"Charles Bernstein and Professional Avant-Gardism" by Alan Golding

[snatched from Bernstein's Web Log]