Todd Gitlin: The Whole World is Watching (1980)

Todd Gitlin’s The Whole World is Watching studies the impact of the mass media on the development of the American New Left. More specifically, Gitlin examines how CBS news and The New York Times covered the actions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1965 and how media coverage confronted that leftist organization with a series of unexpected and untested opportunities and obstacles. Gitlin’s theoretical framework is a combination of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis and Raymond Wiliams’ reworking of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. These two theories work well enough for Gitlin, though readers shouldn’t expect anything particularly innovative or sophisticated from the book. Gitlin argues that the concentrated power of the mass media has changed the conditions in which political movements are created, popularized, criticized, and defeated. While the New Left did successfully publish its own underground newspapers and journals and achieved many victories at both local and national levels, the mass media continually tempted the movement with promises of a truly mass audience and membership, and lured movement leaders with images of political power and celebrity. And once the mass media began paying attention to SDS around 1965, it became hard for the organization to ignore its treatment in the press and to resist taking efforts to actively shape that media treatment. So for better or worse, SDS entered into an ongoing hegemonic struggle to modify the media frames guiding how political events and movements were selected, interpreted, and presented to audiences. Gitlin ignores SDS’s own underground publications and focuses on a rather narrow archive of news articles and films from CBS and The New York Times, but he supplements this material with his own experience in SDS (Gitlin was SDS president right before the period studied). He explains that one of his motives in writing the book was the “experience of disjuncture” he felt when, after returning home from a demonstration or political action, he read or saw news coverage that presented an entirely different reality. Gitlin is extremely critical of SDS’s turn toward the violence of Weatherman, a shift he argues the mass media contributed to, so readers should critically approach Gitlin’s own frame of analysis. Although SDS had already been active for five years, it was not until 1965 that “SDS was discovered by the national media.” Suddenly, “SDS changed irreversibly from an organization that recruited its elites and communicated its ideas face to face, to an organization that lived in the glare of publicity and recruited both elites and members on the basis of reputations refracted in large part through the channels of mass media.” From then on, its “actions were shaped in part by the codes of mass media operations. It conducted its activities in a social world that recognized it, liked it, and disliked it through media images, media versions of its events and rhetoric. To some extent the movement even recognized itself through mass-mediated images.” Over the next five years, SDS and the media would develop a “grammar of interaction” through which they “would recognize and work on the other.” This grammar was continuously changing: “At times, movement and media were symbiotic, at times antagonistic.” The first section of the book focuses on media coverage of SDS around 1965. Gitlin divides this period into five phases: media ignorance of or indifference to SDS; discovery of the organization after the Berkeley Free Speech movement, prompting some sparse but often sympathetic coverage; major media interest after the anti-war March on Washington, which gave SDS new media power but also tended to trivialize, polarize, and marginalize the organization; the development of “an adversary symbiosis” which divided SDS members on whether to be on the defensive or the offensive against the media spotlight; finally, “media treatment entered into the movement’s internal life,” particularly through its influence on recruiting the new generation of SDS members, Prairie Power. As he surveys this first year of negotiations between SDS and the media, Gitlin shows the deleterious effects of the application of existing media frames to genuinely new political movements and documents cases of sympathetic news reporting being censored by editors influenced by the power elite. He also emphasizes the tendency of the media to rely primarily on the statements of government and university officials in coverage of political student actions. This led to an odd division of labor: “The composite effect was that students produce actions while authorities have thoughts.” SDS began engaging in civil disobedience when protestors carrying out a sit-in in front of the Chase Building in Manhattan were arrested in 1965. Drawing perhaps from existing frames for crime reporting, the media throughout the late 1960s used such arrests as the lead into the event, not the event as cause of the arrests. The power of arrests to attract media attention was/is problematic: “Arrests . . . help democratize access to news for powerless and dissident groups. But not even activists bent on arrest for publicity’s sake can get arrested unless the police authorities decide to make the arrest. (Even the grammar of the passive choice shows that the activists remain passive in the situation: they must get arrested.) When the power to define news is, in effect, turned over to the police, the media are serving to confirm the existing control mechanisms in society.” The next section of Gitlin’s book details the media’s impact on SDS over the next five years. The primary consequences of the media’s focus on SDS included: “generating a membership surge and, consequently, generational and geographical strain among both rank-and-file members and leaders”; “certifying leaders and converting leadership to celebrity”; “inflating rhetoric and militancy”; “elevating a moderate alternative”; “contracting the movement’s experience of time, and helping encapsulate it”; finally, “amplifying and containing the movement’s message at the same time.” Gitlin is particularly critical of the inability of SDS and the New Left’s leaders to handle the spotlight shown on them without becoming celebrities. Part of the problem was the “movement’s internal structure,” “the discrepancy between its values (‘no leaders’) and its organization,” a bureaucratic hand-me-down from the old left. Another factor was the lack of any adult equivalent of SDS, so that movement leaders who “graduated” from the organization often had little place to go but into the media’s eyes. The antiwar movement also contributed by equating effectiveness with numbers, which led leaders to actively seek out media attention. Gitlin argues, “it was the war that counterbalanced [SDS’s] halting search for decentral authority structures and processes, and that rationalized the destructive performances of the movement stars.” Leaders, when transformed by the media into celebrities, often lost all contact with and accountability to the movement base. “They floated in a kind of artificial space, surrounded by halos of processed personality; the media became their constituency.” In general, finding the middle ground between bathing in celebrity status and abdicating all media attention was difficult for many movement leaders. Gitlin summarizes the problem: “Faced with the lures and pressures of a world of instant fame, the movement lost control of its ability to certify and control its own leaders. Celebrity as a political resource for the movement, as a means toward political ends, lapsed into a personal resource to be invested, hoarded, and fought over – or abandoned. The movement’s leaders, ambivalent from the first about leading, had trouble keeping track of the sources of their authority and the obligations it entailed. The rank and file wanted their leaders to lead, but were uneasy with them at the same time; the mixed message they sent made the leaders’ situation as untenable as it was tempting. The cultural apparatus’s structured need for celebrity harmonized with, and selected for, the ambitions of movement leaders.” Gitlin also spends a great deal of time analyzing the media’s role in amplifying and exacerbating the militant and violent tendencies of the movement (towards which, it must be remembered, Gitlin is personally hostile). He argues that media coverage led to inflated rhetoric and militancy, to the need to always up the spectacle of mobilized bodies and violence in order to receive media coverage. The media contributed to this escalation by focusing primarily on the events themselves, not the political reasons behind them. SDS faced the fact that the media often would only lightly cover an event if it did not expect violence. “Where a picket line might have been news in 1965, it took tear gas and bloodied heads to make headlines in 1968. If the last demonstration was counted at 100,000, the next would have to number 200,000; otherwise it would be downplayed or framed as a sign of the movement’s waning.” “The result was that newsmaking power was passing into the hands of the more theatrical leaders and militant activists, agents provocateurs, and the police.” The media contributed to growing militancy and violence, which prompted further state repression, which was responded to by even more militancy and violence. For Gitlin, this cycle led to the dead end of Weatherman, which in its first phase privileged street fighting and the “trashing” of the city, all in front of the cameras. But as sympathy for the antiwar movement grew, the news also began to reverse its frame and give more attention to moderate positions. This media shift contributed to the growing divide in the New Left between the moderates and the militants, and also helped fuel the latter’s emphasis on revolution. “As opposition to the war became more widespread and legitimate, as moderates came to speak of unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam, much of the radical movement that had tried to articulate and focus that opposition found itself curiously stranded and desperate, frantically summoning up extravagant political world views about a coming revolution to explain and justify that feeling to themselves. Lacking a sufficient political base, the flamboyant sects resorted to the engine of revolutionary will – which gave them no political base, no political resonance, but a disproportionate access to the media.” The final result was a media-induced cybernetic nightmare: “Acting, producing mediating images, reacting hastily to the unanticipated consequences of those images, the movement entered a feedback loop without correcting errors.”

Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)

Ken Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, remains a baffling work that seems deliberately constructed to frustrate efforts to pin down the author. The novel’s bulk, experimentation with perspective, and Faulknerian historical details demonstrate that Kesey wanted to follow up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with a work that would seal his reputation as a major author, but his life in many ways had already moved well beyond the limits of literature. After incubating the counter culture at his house in La Honda, Kesey wheeled it out for all of the nation to see in 1964 when he and the Merry Pranksters took a bus trip to New York (with no less than Neal Cassady as the driver) in order to visit the World’s Fair and to be present for the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion. The novel received quite mixed reviews, but the drugged-out, moving multimedia spectacle of the Merry Pranksters’ bus, famously described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had perhaps already supplanted literature for Kesey, who wouldn’t publish another novel for over twenty years. The reception of the novel should not have surprised Kesey, who seems to have constructed its plot as a calculated affront. The narrative takes the side of a family of loggers, the Stampers, who fight against a union strike by gathering together their non-union kin to carry out the labor themselves. By turning the union into the enemy, Sometimes a Great Notion reverses the stance of the radical literature of the 1930s. Kesey acknowledges this historical contrast through the local union representative, Floyd Evenwrite, who remembers his father’s leadership role in the Wobblies. Kesey also reveals his cards when he has one Stamper son imagine saying, “My father is a filthy capitalist and my brother is a motherfucker.” There may be some hints here of the New Left’s dismissal of the iconography of the Old Left (SDS chose its name partially to distance itself from stereotypes about unions and the working class), but a more probable influence is the strong libertarianism underlying much of the counter culture. For much of the 1960s, libertarian hostility toward government intervention and emphasis on individual rights (which could mean everything from the right to control one’s private property to the right to take LSD) were able to find an uneasy place within the left, though the libertarians would move increasingly right in later decades. Kesey’s novel renders each of the Stampers as a super-human personality, for whom it would be unnatural and perhaps impossible to conform to the demands of a union or the local community. For example, when the old Stamper patriarch loses his arm in a logging accident, one of his sons attaches the severed limb to the top of their house with its middle finger out so that it can continuously flip off the community across the river. But the conflict in the novel stems less from the Stampers’ indifference to the economic hardships they cause others than from the friction between personalities within the family. Bookish college student Leland Stamper returns to help the family in its anti-union scabbing so that he can take his revenge on his older half-brother, Hank Stamper, whose godlike strength and force of presence robbed Leland of his manhood when he was just a boy. Kesey’s long descriptions of Oregon’s wet forest river environment, which threatens to wash away all traces of humanity at any moment, helps elevate this family drama to the level of myth, though, as Tom Wolfe points out, that mythology seems to draw less from ancient Greece than from comic books. Through the novel’s wandering first person narration, which jumps from character to character without announcement, each member of the Stamper family comments on the personalities of the others. An intellectual who has been living with his mother on the East Coast, Leland easily perceives and criticizes his half-brother’s obstinate and brutish masculinity as he plots to sleep with his wife and ruin his business. But despite such passages and others that satirize the Stamper men, the novel ultimately revolves around masculine bonding. Kesey’s first novel originally was to be about collegiate sports, and in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest McMurphy breaks his fellow inmates out of the asylum so they can go on a fishing trip. In Sometimes a Great Notion, the two brothers ignore family tragedy, community interests, and, in the end, the love of women as they carry out their eternal – and perhaps loving - struggle with each other, riding off on a pile of logs detached from the rest of the modern world.

Kirkpatrick Sale: SDS (1973)

Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS is an indispensable and exhaustive history of not just Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) but also the American New Left (Verso needs to acquire the rights and re-release this book). Appearing only a few years after SDS’s demise (members of Weatherman were still underground), Sale’s book is insightful and critical while avoiding the condescension of so much other historiography of the 1960s, which presumes to be able to judge between the good sixties and the bad sixties. Sale divides the history of SDS into four periods: “[T]he first, the period of Reorganization from 1960 to 1962 when SDS takes a new name and lays the basis for the shape it was to become; the second, the period of Reform from 1962 to 1965 when SDS tries to make American institutions live up to American ideals; the third, the period of Resistance from 1965 to 1968 when SDS spreads out from coast to coast with open confrontations against these institutions; and the last, the period of Revolution from 1968 to 1970 when SDS sets itself consciously for a thorough – and, for some, violent – overthrow of the American system.” SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). Around 1960, members of SLID decided to change the organization’s name because “industrial democracy” seemed too labor oriented, made recruiting difficult, and held too strong of an association with the dusty politics of the League for Industrial Democracy, SLID’s parent organization. So in January 1960, the name was changed to Students for a Democratic Society. Sale argues this change, noticed by few, “was symbolic of a new attitude within the organization, a new awareness that the American studentry was getting ready to shed its apathy for a resurgent life of activism and that a student organization like SDS could help on its way.” A number of factors influenced this changing position of students: transformations in the social fabric (loosening sexual morals, straining of the nuclear family, etc.); cracks in the economic structure (the “discovery” of poverty, high unemployment for certain parts of the population, inflation, etc.); political apathy turning into hostility toward political corruption and bureaucracy; America’s increasing tendency to take a visibly active and aggressive role on the international scene; a new hostility toward institutions based on the “’delegitimization’ of authority and the ‘deauthorization’ of the entire system”; the growing recognition of the power held by youth, resulting in the creation of a distinct and large “youth market”; and the spectacular rise in the number of college students, so that “In the sixties, for the first time in the history of any nation, there were more students than there were farmers.” SDS initially committed itself to the cause of the civil right movement. A grant from Detroit’s United Automobile Workers Union allowed SDS to hire a “full-time national officer,” Robert Haber, who devoted himself to making SDS an organization that could coordinate local civil rights protests at a national level. Haber’s plans for SDS immediately collided with the reformist, liberal anti-communism of the League for Industrial Democracy, but Haber pushed forward anyway and the conflict between the two organizations was put off, though it regularly resurfaced until there was a final split in 1965. During the 1961-62 school year, SDS largely consisted of Haber working in the National Office producing newsletters, copying pamphlets, and making speeches and Tom Hayden operating out in the field of the civil rights movement. But by “mid-fall SDS claimed a membership of 575 and twenty campus chapters.” At the national conference held in Ann Arbor, it was decided that what the organization needed was not “a single national program” but rather “a shared view of the world,” a manifesto that eventually took the form of The Port Huron Statement. The document was named for the camp “belonging to the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, Michigan” where a meeting of delegates helped draft the text, though the final statement was not actually completed until a month later. Sale critically points out that much of The Port Huron Statement was unoriginal, drawing heavily from C. Wright Mills or repeating the ideas of liberal reformism, “but what gave it a particular strength was its radical sense that all of these problems were interconnected, that there was a total system of America within which its multiple parts functioned, and that social ills in one area were intimately linked to those in another, so that solutions, too, had to be connected.” The document articulated an “ideology,” a “vision of the future” based on the values of “humanism,” “individualism,” “community,” and “participatory democracy,” and offered a strategy centered on using “the universities as the ‘potential base and agency in a movement of social change.’” Over the next few years, tens of thousands of copies of the document were sent out, so “The Port Huron Statement may have been the most widely distributed document of the American left in the sixties.” Although The Port Huron Statement treated the university as an exceptional space for basing struggle, by 1962 the emphasis on university reform was already being contested. SDS faced two different conceptions of higher education: “Are the universities bases from which assaults can effectively be made on the social system, or are they bastions of that system producing instead its minions? The former impulse leads to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, to student power, to the explosive rebellions of the campuses; the latter leads to SDS’s ghetto-organizing projects, to the ‘free universities,’ to the ‘dropout’ culture of the youth ghettos, and more.” The question, of course, has never been definitively answered, and would dramatically flare up in different ways throughout SDS’s history, pushing the organization either towards or away from the university. By the 1962-63 school year, SDS also began to face another contradiction that would trouble the organization over the rest of the decade. The paradox: “A student group that wants the growth of decentralized communities where participatory democracy can operate has at its center a single, centralized office.” “SDS almost without even thinking of it became an organization of officers at the top and bureaucratic administrators below, constitutions and bylaws, parliamentary meetings and points of order, conventions and committees, mimeograph machines and official documents, letters in triplicate and bills paid monthly, lists of members and calculations of dues, accounts receivable and payable, mailing lists, files, phones, a central office.” When, as happened many times during the decade, the national office had problems managing time and resources, handling the media (not an issue until 1965), and formulating policies and strategies, the local and regional chapters became increasingly isolated from and even antagonistic to the national organization and leadership. One inadequate solution enacted was to require the national leadership to regularly rotate, so Haber was replaced by Todd Gitlin as president. By 1963, “SDS had succeeded in establishing for itself a solid reputation as the most intellectual student group around, the place where the leaders and ideologues of other organizations went from time to time to forge their separate swords in the fires of debate and intellectuality.” “But it was not known for doing anything on its own, either as a national group or (with few exceptions) in its chapters. That, combined with the organizational limitations of the National Office, chafed increasingly on a number of the SDS in-group, and they began searching for new drives and programs that would energize the membership and circumvent the NO.” The call for a “new insurgency” led to the creation of The Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a program for SDS members to move into the ghetto and live amongst and organize poor, unemployed youth. Though it persisted for a few years, ERAP was a notorious failure, with ghetto youths taking little interest in being “organized” by intellectual outsiders. It also caused significant conflict within SDS, as many ERAPers argued that members should forget about school and dedicate themselves “entirely to community organizing.” The “tension between those who wanted to go into the real world and build a Movement and those who wanted to stay and organize in the universities would continue to be felt in the organization in the years to come.” But ERAP radicalized many SDS members, gave SDS a reputation for actually doing things, and taught members valuable practical lessons as they attempted to put their ideas into action. In 1964, Paul Potter was elected president and SDS began to seek out new projects and to experiment with the form of the organization. But that same year also saw the emergence of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Battle of Berkeley, which opened many students’ eyes to the truth of American society. “During the course of the fight it was discovered that the university did not live up to its claims, but, more than that, neither did the police, the press, and the public, the very personifications of the society: the university proved not to be the home of fair and dispassionate reasoning, the regents showed themselves not to be wise statesmen above pettiness and vindictiveness, the press turned out not to be an unbiased and objective seeker after truth, the police proved not to be efficient agents of justice and servants of the people, and the public at large turned out not to be open to reason, to be willing to listen to another side of a story, to harbor sympathy.” Though still relatively limited in size and capabilities, SDS became viewed as the organization for student groups across the nation to turn to as they extended the fight of Berkeley. But it was the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 that truly fueled the radicalization of the student movement and quickly prompted demonstrations on numerous campuses as well as a spike in SDS’s membership. SDS’s national office went into full gear in preparation for the large anti-war march planned in Washington D.C., but the organization’s frontism, its willingness to work with a variety of different groups, led to trouble with the League for Industrial Democracy, which ineffectively demanded that SDS sever all contact with communist organizations. By the fall of 1965, the two organizations would divorce over the increasing number of communist members in SDS and other reformist/radical disagreements. Shortly before the Washington march, SDS engaged in its “first official act of civil disobedience”: a “sit-in” in front of a Chase bank in Manhattan, during which protestors were arrested for refusing to disperse. A week later, the first “teach-in” was held at the University of Michigan, and the tactic soon spread across the nation. But “SDS as an organization never promoted [teach-ins] as a part of its over-all strategy. This was not only because the teach-ins were in the main faculty-led and faculty-directed, but because SDSers felt that these were essentially apolitical exercises whose best effect could be only to educate but not to radicalize.” “Without ever even enunciating it or having to make an official decision, SDS indicated by its passive response that it had gone beyond the moderation of the teach-in phase of antiwar politics. It had by now learned bitter lessons about reformism, and it was coming to feel that only with the kind of confrontation and militancy a march represented could America be changed.” At the Washington march, Paul Potter gave his famous “name the system” speech, adding to the strong passions aroused at the event. But mass civil disobedience was contained at the end of the march (SDS itself played a strong role in keeping marchers “in line”), leading to a feeling of disappointment for many. Despite SDS’s bursting into the public’s eyes with the Washington march, the national office decided not to commit SDS to being simply an anti-war organization. Money and organizational problems impaired the effectiveness of the national office, which struggled to develop anti-war policies and strategies and began to alienate many of SDS’s newer members and local chapters. Some members pushed for a new Port Huron to reestablish the organization, but conferences and meetings devoted to that purpose failed to accomplish much. When the government decided to start drafting students using a ranking system, local SDS members organized a sit-in at the University of Chicago that occupied the administration building for five days. The campus administration avoided conflict and waited for the sit-in to slowly die out, but in a faculty meeting shortly after, “the faculty voted to threaten harsh disciplinary action against future sit-ins or campus disruptions, and to put itself unshirkingly behind the administration policy with regard to ranking. The blow was severe, the students hardly believing that two months of work and negotiations and demonstrations and petitions and letters and arguments had produced not one single concession. But since the end of the school year was at hand, and regroupment was now impossible, there was little recourse.” But the sit-in at Chicago revealed that university administrations were “complicit” with the interests of business and government and demonstrated a new willingness by students to directly resist. “The realization of complicity on the part of the university, combined with a realization of how readily it could be confronted, was a crucial element in helping to turn attention back to the campus during the rest of the year.” But as was often the case, the turn towards the university was accompanied by a turn away from it. Around the same time, SDS assisted in the creation of a number of “free universities,” where alternative education could take place outside of traditional institutions. But doubts about free universities soon appeared in the following few years because they may have actually helped traditional universities by moving troublemakers outside and by creating innovative programs that could be co-opted by universities. But, Sale notes, the free universities were important as a significant attempt by the New Left to create a truly autonomous form of education and organization. As SDS continued to grow, the local ranks became increasingly powerful and independent of the national office, though the latter attempted to maintain some control through New Left Notes, a weekly newspaper which started appearing in 1966. Around this time, SDS’s constituency visible changed. The older members, and especially the national leadership, were confronted with “Prairie Power,” a younger generation, often from the Midwest rather than the East coast, that dressed less formally (more facial hair and hippie fashion) and was less versed in the history of the left, more anarchistic and hostile to the national leadership, and impatient for change. Partially in response to the demands of Prairie Power, SDS began organizing at the university level for “student power,” but with an ultimate aim of creating a general radical student movement. So though demands might be immediate at times, it was believed that “Student power in short, was not educational but political.” SDS played a key role in organizing campus protests against military recruiters and visits by government officials. The draft was a key issue that led to what Greg Calvert in 1966 called the move “From protest to resistance” (a phrase Ulrike Meinhof would import into the German New Left). Draft resistance actions spread, and there was a mass draft-card burning in New York City in 1967 as well as more protests about university complicity with the war. But there was still a growing feeling that mobilization in marches and other activities were accomplishing nothing in regards to stopping the war, and that something like “revolution” was on the table at that point. “The problem, as those of the SDS leadership saw it, was how to move more people from personal action to political commitment, how to raise the level of those who were so obviously potential recruits – the draft resister, the campus demonstrator, the antiwar marcher – to that of ‘revolutionary consciousness.’ [Carl] Davidson put it simply: ‘We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. But again, how do we go about it?” SDS came up with two solutions. First, “T-O institutes . . . a queer mixture of the familiar graduate-school seminar, the ERAP communal-living projects, and the political ‘cadre schools’ that Old Left groups like the Communist Party used to run during the summers.” Second, proposals for a new ideology to replace The Port Huron Statement. Theoretical analyses were already being produced in abundance and the journal Radical America was a valuable source for theoretical inquiry. “But the most successful ideological contestant was a concept called ‘the new working class,’” which consisted of people with “technical, clerical, and professional jobs that require educational backgrounds.” The new working class was essential for the functioning and reproduction of modern American capitalism, and, if made aware of its function, could come to play the role of a political vanguard. The theory returned emphasis to the campus as the site of resistance by arguing that students need to start with their own situation. As Sale states its impact: “Liberals operate out of other people’s oppression; the radical operates out of his own.” The summer of 1967 of course saw the beginning of the wave of dramatic political activity that would extend until at least 1970. Sale stops to evaluate the state of SDS at this point. Carl Davidson assessed the group at the time, stating, “We have within our ranks Communists of both varieties, socialists of all sorts, 3 or 4 different kinds of anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, syndicalists, social democrats, humanist liberals, a growing number of ex-YAF libertarian laissez-faire capitalists, and, of course, the articulate vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.” Davidson also surveyed the composition of a typical SDS campus chapter. He argued 85-90% of the membership were “shock troops,” usually younger undergraduates with anti-intellectual tendencies but strong moral outrage at the American system. 5-10% were the “superintellectuals,” mostly graduate students in Social Sciences or Humanities: “They spell out grand strategies for the chapter’s activities, but will rarely sit behind the literature tables. . . . They join most of the demonstrations, but rarely help make the picket signs . . . Without a doubt some of the most brilliant young people in America today.” Finally, 5% were the “organizers,” those who “do the bureaucratic shitwork (reserving rooms, setting up tables, ordering literature, etc.) or see that it gets done.” In 1967, women began to visibly protest the elitist, male chauvinist leadership of the group, and SDS’s indifference to women’s issues would lead to many women leaving the organization over the next few years. During 1967, repression of the left became even more violent and leftists exhibited an increased tendency to directly resist and even fight back in order to make sure that disruption was successful. As Davidson puts it, “No one goes limp anymore, or meekly to jail. Police violence does not go unanswered. Sit-ins are no longer symbolic, but strategic: to protect people or hold positions, rather than to allow oneself to be passively stepped over or carted off.” This boldness was most clear in the 1967 Pentagon protest, which saw protestors (including SDSers) rushing through barriers and up the steps of the building as well as sneaky mass arrests in the middle of the night (for a firsthand account, see Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night). Despite the formulation of the new working class theory, SDSers, especially the more intellectual ones, were increasingly led to Marxism, which the early generation of SDSers had scorned for its association with the Old Left. Sale admits this shift toward Marx may have had good reasons, but he is skeptical of the tendency to accept Marxism as a readymade ideology. “[T]he SDS leadership began to see itself more and more (in the Marxist phraseology) as a ‘vanguard’ in the impending revolution, or at least as the core of that potential vanguard. The people around the [national office] itself became an increasingly close-knit group: a number of the staff lived and slept together in nearby apartments in a quasi-communal style; they shared drug experiences (marijuana mostly, but also LSD), out of which came, initially at least, a sense of closeness and unity; and they developed their political ideas together both through formal and informal meetings which they held to ‘advance their political education.’” But many SDS members resented and resisted the leadership’s turn toward revolution and Marx, and a split grew between the national organization focusing on revolution and the local chapters dedicated to base-building. Needless to say, 1968 saw protest and resistance appear in almost every possible location and form. Particularly new and newsworthy were the outbursts of political violence aimed at property, including bombings of campus buildings linked to the war. SDS did not immediately embrace such violence, labeling those responsible “adventurists.” “And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew, and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence.” And then “Columbia” happened. The local Columbia SDS chapter played a large role in articulating an argument about the school’s links to the war and the racism of the university’s plans to expand into neighboring Harlem. SDSer Mark Rudd became a leader of the “action faction” heading the occupations movement. The first occupation received an ambivalent response, and when it seemed like it might fail SDS voted down Rudd’s proposal to take more buildings. But when other organizations successfully took over other buildings, SDS turned around and joined in supporting the wave of occupations. After the occupations were violently ended by the police, the liberal wing of the student body took back power from the more radical side, aided by the fact that groups like SDS lacked a coherent counter-proposal. “But three momentous experiences which underlay the Columbia rebellion did linger and did much to shape the revolutionary politics that SDS was edging toward. The first was the experience of those who encountered the communal life – thrown together with like-minded men and women, sharing, meeting, loving, eating, defecating, sleeping, talking, and deciding together, with no authority, no rules, no force to limit them, and making the decisions that affected their own lives.” “The second experience grew out of the alliance with black students . . . and the strength this gave to the white students’ cause. The blacks were slow in joining the issues at Columbia (it was SDS, for example, which instigated the gym and Martin Luther King protests) and insisted on going their own way once they had . . . but their mere presence gave the rebellion legitimacy, confidence, and power.” The third experience “had to do with the students’ taking a political view of themselves, and their university, and the society beyond, confronting the true implications of the old SDS slogan, ‘A free university in a free society.’” As the complicity of the administration and the faculty, as well as the liberal student body, was made clear, it became obvious that something more than reform was needed. As one SDSer stated, “’a free university’ will only exist after we have won a ‘free society.’” In order to undermine the SDS call for “two, three, many Columbias,” college administrations across the nation tried to offer friendly “restructuring” plans that would win over the support of faculty and students by offering more shared governance. But such efforts did little to stop the wave of campus demonstrations that immediately followed Columbia and the further radicalization of the student movement. By the 1968 SDS convention, “revolutionary” was a preferred adjective and statement of identity. “By the middle of 1968 there were many thousands of people who could, with no sense of hyperbole, agree with the SDS convention paper which argued ‘our movement is an element of the revolutionary vanguard painfully forming from the innards of America.” But at this time, Progressive Labor, a Maoist group with strict political lines emphasizing the organization of the working class, made its first strong bid for control of SDS. Despite its small numbers, Progressive Labor was able to acquire a great deal of power through its ability to order its members to vote in a bloc. An attempt was made to kick Progressive Labor out of SDS at the East Lansing convention, but it failed, and the final conflict between the two was put off for another year. Many groups on the left were planning protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and a number of first-generation SDSers were leading such efforts, but SDS’s national leadership at first did not support protesting the convention because it considered electoral politics a lost cause. However, as momentum for the protests grew, SDS reluctantly sent out some lines of communication and support. It was important that SDS didn’t neglect the event because police brutality at the convention, as seen on the streets and in the news, did much to further radicalize the left. “For SDS, the lessons of Chicago were profound, and each of them seemed to confirm the rightness of the move into revolution. Chicago proved once and for all, for those still needing proof, that the country could not be educated or reformed out of its pernicious system, even by establishmentarian reformers like McCarthy. It showed that even resistance, open and defiant resistance, was not enough to wrest changes, for the institutions of American society, grounded in violence, would use violence in their own defense when the threat was regarded as serious enough.” But Sale underscores that SDS in many ways failed to effectively to take advantage of the growing strength of the radical movement. The organization was partially crippled by bitter internal divisions at every level over issues such as dope or no dope, action or education, revolution or base-building. Sale is particularly critical of how the focus on revolution may have alienated SDS from its constituency. Although Sale admits the intelligence and reasons for the SDS’s leadership turn to revolution, he is critical of its failure to connect with potential supporters: “At a time when many young people wanted some explanations for the failure of electoral politics, SDS was led by people who had long since given up caring about elections and were trying to organize for revolution. To students just beginning to be aware of their own radicalization and their potential role as the intelligentsia of an American left, SDS offered the wisdom that the only really important agents for social change were the industrial workers, or the ghetto blacks, or the Third World revolutionaries. For college students who swarmed into chapter meetings ready to take on their administrations for any number of grievances, SDS provided an analysis which emphasized ‘de-studentizing,’ dropping out, and destroying universities. And for youth in search of an integrative ideology to supplant the tattered theories of corporate liberalism, SDS had only the imperfectly fashioned tenets of a borrowed Marxism and an untransmittable attachment to the theories of other revolutionaries.” By the fall of the 1968, repression had also began to take its toll on SDS and the New Left, with government spying and infiltration, police arrests, college administration sanctions, and a variety of forms of liberal cooptation sapping some of the strength of the left. For better or worse, “After years of demanding to be taken seriously, activists found that they were.” Political protest, resistance, and violence continued in 1969, the extent of the last showing just how thoroughly “violence had become a real part of the lexicon of American left-wing politics.” SDS officially remained ambivalent about the wave of political bombings and property destruction, but the organization’s revolutionary fervor made the group sympathetic most of the time. Around this time, SDS committed itself to building a “revolutionary youth movement” and also began to make contacts with other groups, particularly the Black Panthers. But the leadership was leading the organization into a corner. “How ironic it all was: at precisely the time of the greatest explosion of the American left in all of the decade, SDS, its leading organization by every index – size, fame, geographical scope, energy – was gradually but unmistakably isolating and diminishing itself, losing its student constituency, its women, its alumni, failing to connect with the high schools, the soldiers, the workers. The SDS revolutionaries were on the barricades, but they had forgotten to look behind: their troops were no longer following.” Everything fell apart at the 1969 summer convention. During the convention, issues of New Left Notes passed out included an article with the title, taken from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The Weatherman statement was directly aimed at the growing power of Progressive Labor, and called for a centralized revolutionary party while it positioned white American radicals as comrades of the struggles of Third World guerillas and supporters of “black liberation struggles.” Sexist statements made by Black Panthers about “pussy power” at the convention gave Progressive Labor an opportunity to take the moral high ground and criticize the Panthers as well SDS’s growing support for black nationalism. A written statement by the Panthers later read at the convention attacked Progressive Labor, and a group of SDS leaders spontaneously split the convention by leading non-Progressive Labor members out of the hall, resulting in two SDSs, and in reality the death of SDS. The concluding chapter of SDS’s history focuses on Weatherman, which would soon attempt to lead a violent direct attack on the system during the October “Days of Rage” and after. Of course protest and resistance continued without the SDS, and perhaps in even greater number in the next few months. Yet Sale argues, “It was impossible, of course, to stop the activism of college campuses . . . but now there was no easy way for that activism to be infused with politics, with the kinds of understanding that from the beginning SDS had worked so hard to project and transmit. A campus might explode with anger over a tuition increase, but there would be no common appreciation of how that connected with the role of the university in a corporate society; a lengthy campaign against ROTC or university investments might excite a college, but there would be little understanding of the links with imperialism; students across the land could get outraged at the perilous conditions of the ecology without ever seeing the nature of the capitalist system and how it works to produce and prolong that peril. Without something like an SDS, there would be no ready political mooring; without a political mooring, activism goes adrift.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Explained

The Postmodern Explained collects a series of letters that do indeed offer a relatively straightforward explanation of various aspects of Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern. Though drawing from the ideas of his later work such as The Differend, Lyotard returns to and clearly discusses many of the points of The Postmodern Condition, including the modern/postmodern distinction, the collapse of the West’s grand narratives, and the problem the multiplicity of language games causes for the act of legitimation. One of the first letters notes the widespread contemporary interest in “liquidating the legacy of the avant-gardes.” But in a society where authority takes the name of capital, avant-gardes no longer have to be replaced by mediocre realism. What Lyotard calls “transavantgardism” dominates not by rejecting the avant-garde but by neutralizing it through eclecticism: “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you east McDonald’s at mid-day and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows.” But, Lyotard argues, “this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible and useful to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realize. This realism accommodates every tendency just as capitalism accommodates every ‘need’ – so long as these tendencies and needs have buying power.” In contrast to this “realism of money,” Lyotard offers his well known theory of art and the sublime. Drawing quite heavily on Kant, specifically The Critique of Judgment, Lyotard argues that the mind is capable of having an Idea of something that can never be concretely experienced. That is, it is possible to have an Idea of the “unpresentable.” The sublime occurs “when the imagination in fact fails to present any object that could accord with a concept.” Modern art, according to Lyotard, devoted itself “to presenting the existence of something unpresentable,” and accomplished this task largely through the use of “formlessness, the absence of form, [as] a possible index to the unpresentable,” and through “empty abstraction” that is “itself like a presentation of the infinite, its negative presentation.” What distinguished modern from postmodern art is the modality of the approach to “the sublime relationship of the presentable with the conceivable.” Modern art exhibits a “nostalgia for presence“ whereas postmodern art places emphasis “on the power of the faculty to conceive.” “So this is the differend [the irresolvable difference of opinion]: the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator materials for consolation and pleasure.” But the sublime involves pleasure and pain. So “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.” The postmodern therefore must be understood in the future anterior, since the artist will “work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made.” Many of the letters in the middle of the volume take up the collapse of the West’s “grand narratives.” Lyotard almost salvages this over-used and over-extended argument by using Kant to identify a specific set of important grand narratives of modernity, which include, “The progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labor (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist technoscience.” These grand narratives stand above others because “they look for legitimacy . . . in a future to be accomplished, that is, in an Idea [in the Kantian sense] to be realized. This Idea (of freedom, ‘enlightenment,’ socialism, etc.) has legitimating value because it is universal. It guides every human reality. It gives modernity its characteristic mode: the project.” Needless to say, although technoscience still keeps rushing forward and further destabilizing humanity, for Lyotard “the project of modernity” has been “liquidated.” The French title of Lyotard’s book translates as “postmodernism explained to children,” and the letters are addressed to the children of his friends and colleagues. But it is hard to imagine many children fully comprehending Lyotard’s references to Adorno’s negative dialectics, Habermas’ appraisal of the project of modernity, and Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Some of the later letters in the volume reveal how the title might be disingenuous. Lyotard explicitly turns to the topic of childhood when he brings up Adorno’s idea of “micrologies,” such as the tales of childhood in Benjamin’s One Way Street, which register an event that is an initiation, that “cut[s] open a wound in the sensibility,” a wound that “has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality.” And later, when speaking of the difficulty of teaching philosophy, which requires a kind of autodidacticism, to a young generation already indoctrinated into a world of exchange, narcissism, and competition, Lyotard singles out for praise Vincennes (University of Paris-VIII) and its non-traditional students: “Maybe there is more childhood available to thought at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood.”

Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis (2010)

Since the peak of the radical movements of the 1960 and 70s, there has been a “resigned surrender,” a new “deference towards the capitalo-parliamentarian or ‘Western order.’” In many ways, according to Badiou, this widespread aversion to communism, and even socialism, resembles a return to a 1950s-style liberal anti-communism more busy dogmatically hunting out the roots of totalitarianism than taking an interest in the possibility of genuine change. Capitalist realism today assumes that “socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice.” Rather than accept this description of the failure of an Idea, Badiou asks what is the idea of failure being deployed here? He writes, “What exactly do we mean by ‘failure’ when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?” Taking from mathematics the example of Fermat’s theorem, which took three centuries of “failures” to be proven, Badiou argues, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.” His book is therefore structured around three examples – May ’68, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Paris Commune – that show that “failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history. At least for all those who are not blinded by the propagandist use of the notion of failure.” His first chapter elaborates on different kinds of failures by using selections from his L’Echarpe rouge and L’Incident d’Antioche, and offers a rare glimpse in English into his literary writings. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is not a systematic new text on the Idea of Communism, but rather a collection of conference presentations and articles that have appeared elsewhere, the most notable being his presentation at the 2009 “The Idea of Communism” conference. The first major section of the book deals with May ’68, and consists of two more recent essays and one (more flawed and less interesting) text written by Badiou in the heat of the moment in 1968. The wave of commemorations of May’ 68, particularly around its 40th anniversary, can be interpreted in two pessimistic ways: May ’68 is truly dead and therefore it is harmless to remember and celebrate it; or, May’ 68, in its “individualism and the taste for jouissance,” was the true birth of “neo-liberal capitalism,” which can now openly admit this fact. Badiou contrasts these two dark interpretations with two more optimistic ones: interest in May ’68 is “an anti-Sarkozy reflex;” or, once again spreading is the “idea that a different political and societal world is possible.” Badiou concludes that such contradictory interpretations of May ’68 are possible because it was a “heterogeneous multiplicity,” “an “event of great complexity.” In fact, there were “four different ‘May ‘68s.’” They include: 1) an uprising of students, who, although only a small minority, demonstrated “the extraordinary strength of the ideology and the symbols, the Marxist vocabulary and the idea of revolution” and a new “acceptance of violence.” 2) a massive general strike that originated outside of “official working-class institutions,” made “systematic use of factory occupations” as well of “kidnapping bosses,” and revealed that something “rebelled against the attempts to find a classic negotiated settlement to the general strike.” 3) a “libertarian May” that entailed moral, sexual, and cultural innovations. Speaking of these first three May ‘68s, Badiou claims they “were represented by great symbolic sites: the occupied Sorbonne for students, the big car plants (and especially Billancourt) for workers, and the occupation of the Odéon theatre for the libertarian May.” Then Badiou turns to the fourth May ’68, which he explains was “crucial, and it still prescribes what the future will bring. It is more difficult to read because if unfolded over time and was not an instantaneous explosion. . . . it dominated the period between 1968 and 1978, and was then repressed and absorbed by the . . . miserable ‘Mitterand years.’” This fourth May’ 68 involved “the conviction that, from the 1960s onwards, we are witnessing the end of an old conception of politics” and a “search for a new conception of politics.” This May ’68 entails giving up the idea of a privileged revolutionary subject as well of the assurance that objective forces would produce the revolution (the party aimed to bring these subjective and objective agencies together). Nonetheless, according to Badiou, the major actors of May ’68 shared the “same language” of classes and class struggle and “united under the red flag.” “But the secret truth, which was gradually revealed, is that this common language, symbolized by the red flag, was in fact dying out. There was a basic ambiguity about May ’68: a language that was spoken by all was beginning to die out. There is a sort of temporary lack of distinction between what is beginning and what is coming to an end.” Badiou summarizes: “The fourth May ’68 is seeking to find that which might exist beyond the confines of classic revolutionism. It seeks blindly because it uses the same language as the language that dominated the conception it was trying to get away from.” He adds, “The fourth May is the diagonal that links the other three. All the new initiatives that allowed us to circulate between these three heterogeneous movements, and especially between the student movement and the workers’ movement, were our treasure-trove.” Badiou singles out the interaction between students and workers, both of whom refused to stick to assigned positions and roles, as embodying the communist ideal of a “polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives.” Badiou argues we are “contemporaries of May ’68” because “we have the same problem, and are the contemporaries of the problem revealed by May ’68: the classical figure of the politics of emancipation was ineffective.” Our “fidelity to May ‘68” must therefore entail a “reformulation of the communist hypothesis,” which, stated negatively, asserts that “the existing world is not necessary,” and that therefore “a different world is possible.” The second section of the book deals with the Cultural Revolution, which, Badious argues, “has been a constant and lively point of reference for militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies.” The “dominant historiographical version” attributes the Cultural Revolution to the failure of the Great Leap Forward and to a voluntarist attempt by Mao to regain power from the rest of the party-state bureaucracy. Badiou instead wants to consider the Cultural Revolution as a real political question, and therefore offers his own account of the Cultural Revolution as a narrower “sequence that runs from November 1965 to July 1968.” He justifies this frame by arguing: “The criterion is the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name.” Badiou maintains that “the Cultural Revolution is the last significant political sequence that is still internal to the party-state (in this case, the Chinese Communist Party), and fails as such.” By “saturat[ing[ the form of the party-state,” the Cultural Revolution demonstrates the need to develop a politics “outside the spectre of the party-state.” Mao turned to “political mass mobilization” to revolutionize the ossified party-state structure, but, Badiou argues, Mao always had to contain those very revolutionary forces and their innovations back within the form of the party-state. Badiou writes: “This recourse assumes that one admit uncontrolled forms of revolt and organization. Mao’s group, after a great deal of hesitation, will in fact impose that these be admitted, first in the universities and then in the factories. But, in a contradictory move, it will also try to bring together all organizational innovations of the revolution in the general space of the party-state.” To illustrate his hypothesis that “the Cultural Revolution is the historical development of [this] contradiction,” Badiou examines seven Cultural Revolution referents: the “Sixteen Points” decision in 1966, the rise of the Red Guards, the “revolutionary rebel workers” and the Shanghai Commune, power seizures, the Wuhan incident, the “workers’ entry into the universities,” and “Mao’s cult of personality.” These examples show how the Cultural Revolution “marks an irreplaceable experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path, to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of workers’ struggle under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.” Badiou concludes: “We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’, and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag.” The third section of the book turns to the Paris Commune of 1871, which, Badiou argues, “for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements.” Writing on the Commune, Marx, according to Badiou, praised the Commune for those features that seemed to dissolve the state (direct arming of the people, the end of the separation of powers, internationalism) while faulting the Commune for lacking features closely tied to the state form ( “weak military centralization; its inability to define financial priorities;” etc). That is, the Commune is at once praised for its freedom from the state and criticized for its failure to exercise state power. Badiou claims, “The fact of the matter is that the ambiguity of Marx’s account will be carried both by the social-democratic disposition and by its Leninist radicalization, that is, in the fundamental motif of the party, for over a century.” Badiou explains: “the party realizes the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the Commune, gives it body. It becomes the political site of a fundamental tension between the non-state, even anti-state, character of a politics of emancipation, and the statist character of the victory and duration of that politics.” The “party-state” seems to be the solution to the contradictions of the Commune, but, according to Badiou, it empties the Commune “of all properly political content.” Resisting that dead end approach, Badiou proceeds to examine the development of the Commune using the philosophical framework of his Logics of Worlds, whose complexity and terminology I’ll not attempt to reproduce here. Badiou claims that the 18th of March is a site whose content is “the appearing of a worker-being . . . in the space of governmental and political capacity.” The “Commune event, begun on 18 March 1871, did not have the effect of destroying the dominant group and its politicians. But something more important was destroyed: the political subordination of workers and the people. . . . The absolutization of worker political existence (the existence of the inexistent), convulsive and crushed, had all the same destroyed the necessity of a basic form of subjection; that is, the subjection of a possible proletarian politics to the scheming of (leftist) bourgeois politicians. Like every veritable event, the Commune had not realized a possible, it had created one. This possible is simply that of an independent proletarian politics.” The final section more directly discusses the Idea of Communism. He presents “the Idea of communism” as an operation involving “three basic elements – a political, a historical and a subjective one.” A political truth “is a concrete, time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice of collective emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear.” But there is also “a historical dimension of a truth,” and the truth’s “historical inscription encompasses an interplay between types of truth that are different from one another and are therefore situated at different points in human time in general.” Finally, in the subjective element, an individual becomes a Subject by deciding to be “a militant of this truth.” He adds, “an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process . . . is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History.” “The communist Idea is what constitute the becoming-political Subject of the individual as also and at the same time his or her projection into History.” As he states in an earlier chapter, “We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. We have to say: ‘Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense. . . . living without an idea is intolerable.’”

Tiziana Terranova: Network Culture (2004)

A sharp, dense, poetic work that draws from autonomist concepts and critical theory, Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture smartly combines philosophy, media studies, and (a critique of) political economy. “Network culture” may seem like a homogenizing term that smoothes over the incredible diversity of contemporary cultural activities, media practices, and technological devices. Terranova therefore begins by explaining that network culture is a “heterogeneous assemblage,” “a meshwork of overlapping cultural formations” that “unfolds across a multiplicity of communication channels but within a single information milieu.” Today, communication systems are increasingly interconnected, so that “informational flows” tend to “spill over” into each other. “What we used to call ‘media messages’ no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane.” This “unprecedented abundance of informational output” and “acceleration of information dynamics” releases “social potentials for transformation. In this sense, a network culture is inseparable both from a kind of network physics (that is physical processes of differentiation and convergence, emergence and capture, openness and closure, and coding and overcoding) and a network politics (implying the existence of an active engagement with the dynamics of information flows).” Terranova’s first chapter analyzes the idea of information and overlaps in many ways with the work of N. Katherine Hayles. After surveying some popular conceptions of this notoriously elusive subject, Terranova argues, “information is neither simply a physical domain nor a social construction, nor the content of a communication act, nor an immaterial entity set to take over the real, but a specific reorientation of forms of power and modes of resistance.” She extracts three different definitions of information from Claude Shannon’s information theory and examines their “other interesting considerations or corollaries on informational culture.” These three definitions are: “information is defined by the relation of signal to noise; information is a statistical measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system; information implies a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system.” She starts with the definition of information as that which stands out from noise. Shannon’s research aimed to discover how a signal could be accurately reproduced across a channel. In his model, information was “the content of communication” that was to be transmitted with a “minimum loss of quality.” But information in this sense “is not defined by meaning,” but rather by “a pattern of redundancy and frequency that allows a communication machine to distinguish it from noise.” Information theory tries to show how to “increase the effectiveness of the channel” “by excluding all interference, that is by holding off noise,” noise that is increasingly ubiquitous in informational culture. This technical conception of communication emphasizes “the imperatives of the channel and the code rather than . . . a concern with exchange of ideas, ethical truth or rhetorical confrontation. . . . It is not about signs, but about signals.” The treatment of communication as an “operational problem” calls forth a specific kind of political response. Opposing broadcasters and advertisers that exploit this “minimal condition” of communication are culture jammers from graffiti artists to the magazine Adbusters who work toward “disrupting the smooth efficiency of the communication machine” by distorting and hijacking channels. Terranova adds that the corporate adoption of this technical conception of communication might be extremely misguided “because it does not take sufficiently into account the powers of feedback or retro-action – increasingly cynical or even angry audiences/receivers or just a kind of social entropy that nonlinearizes the transmission of messages as such.” She briefly dives into the work of Gilbert Simondon to speculate that it might be better to consider “the conditions of turbulence and metastability that define information as a kind of active line marking a quantic process of individuation.” Terranova then turns to the second definition of information as “the communication and exclusion of probable alternatives.” This definition asserts that there is a closed system of possibilities, a field of probabilities, from which one alternative is selected and realized. Codification of a channel involves a “kind of containment of the openness of the situation to a set of mutually excluding alternatives.” There are clear ideological implications to this definition, since the determination of the set of probabilities, which allows the measurement and reduction of uncertainty, requires the containment and reduction of a more chaotic reality. One needs only to think of opinion polls or the false “choices” of democratic politics to see the power this definition of information offers. Terranova emphasizes that the containment of alternatives is never simply a technical problem of the limitations of the channel: there is always a complex interplay of codes and channels to resist. “A cultural politics of information is crucially concerned with questioning the relationship between the probable, the possible and the real. It involves the opening up of the virtuality of the world by positing not simply different, but radically other codes and channels for expressing and giving expression to an undetermined potential for change.” But although there is a politically-motivated tendency to reduce an informational milieu to the “couple ‘actual/probable,’” the extremely unlikely, the virtual, is never completely foreclosed. “What lies beyond the possible and the real is thus the openness of the virtual, of the invention and the fluctuation. . . . the cultural politics of information involves a stab at the fabric of possibility, an undoing of the coincidence of the real with the given.” The third definition of information “implies a nonlinear relation between the micro and the macro.” “[As] chaos theory showed, there is no linear and direct relation between the micro . . . and the macro . . . It is as the level of the micro, however, that mutations and divergences are engendered and it is therefore in the micro that the potential for change and even radical transformation lie.” New digital technologies have allowed ever closer approximation of the processes of the micro. In contrast to the previous era’s fixation on macro forms of representation and identity, power today operates through increasingly minute levels of segmentation, “microdissection,” and “modulation.” For example, marketing today relies less on representations of stable social types than on the tracking and capture of volatile (sub)cultural movements. Terranova’s second chapter analyzes what she terms “network dynamics” and complements Alex Galloway’s work on distributed networks in Protocol. She treats the network as a spatial diagram, but hesitates to privilege the Internet as a model of this diagram. The “communication topology of Empire,” the interweaving of numerous information and communication systems, forms a kind of “hypernetwork”: “[T]he network is becoming less and less a description of a specific system, and more a catchword to describe the formation of a single and yet multidimensional information milieu.” However, although such a hypernetwork cannot be reduced to the Internet, the latter “expresses an interesting mutation of the network diagram in its relation to the cultural and political assemblages of this twenty-first century neo-imperial formation.” She emphasizes that the Internet is not a network but rather a “network of networks.” The Internet was designed with an open architecture that allows “divergence and differentiation” while producing a “common space.” Internet Protocol (IP) and Domain Name System (DNS) enable the creation of a “single map” of the web, an “abstract and homogenous space” that she compares to the modernist ideal of the grid: “[There is a] chilling picture of a single information space, divided and distributed on a single grid containing all the possible addresses of all possible machines.” There are clear parallels between this picture of the worldwide web as a homogeneous space and critical accounts of the homogenizing effects of globalization, which replaces local cultural difference with global commercial sameness. But if the Internet and/or globalization produce such flattened spaces, wouldn’t they result in “frozen” systems of difference incapable of dynamic change? To answer this question, Terranova draws from Henri Bergson the concept of duration, describing how change occurs not just through the movement of information but also through the transformation, the becoming, of the topology of the entire network milieu. She then discusses how TCP/IP and common design protocols enable an open architecture by layering content, programs, and technologies, allowing the modulation of “the relationship between differentiation and universality.” “The result is a smooth space that is infinitely crossable by flows of information detached from enclosed milieus and allowed to spread throughout an electronic maze of coaxial and fibre-optic cables and now increasingly also wireless frequencies.” She notes how the architecture of the Internet seems to be a “technical solution” to the postmodern problem of how to acknowledge and celebrate (weak) difference and make it productive. More specifically, the Internet appears as a solution to problems relating to the social factory and immaterial labor because it aids the creation of “cooperation” among different workers and milieus scattered beyond the confines of the factory floor. Terranova then turns to packet switching, the technique through which messages are broken down into small packets that are sent out to find their own way to the message destination. In the Internet, there is not a single channel between sender and receiver but rather “an overall information space, constituted by a tangle of possible directions and routes, where information propagates by autonomously finding the lines of least resistance.” Important for the success of this distributed system is what is known as “fringe intelligence,” the programmed “delegation of responsibility” to nodes across the network that provides a basic kind of “end-to-end intelligence.” “The combination of packet switching, end-to-end intelligence and routing makes computer networks a kind of distributed neural network able to remember and forget. This fringe intelligence produces a space that is not just a ‘space of passage’ for information, but an informational machine itself – an active and turbulent space. This quality of informational space makes the Internet a space suitable to the spread of contagion and transversal propagation of movement (from computer viruses to ideas and affects).” Network politics therefore must involve the “pragmatic production of viable topological formations able to persist within an open and fluid milieu.” Cultural phenomenon on the web have to negotiate the line between being too solid and frozen and too dispersed and self-dissolving. “Any local, that is bounded, cultural phenomenon within the network is always caught on one side by the danger of being overwhelmed by the open network ecology; and on the other side by that of solidifying to the point of becoming a self-contained and self-referential archipelago of the like-minded.” Terranova concludes her chapter on network dynamics by indicating that the Internet intersects with other information flows from other media, and therefore might be situated within a larger duration that would expand to include the “global communication system.” Terranova’s third chapter draws from autonomist theory on the social factory to examine the increase in “free labor” on the Internet, the “voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” labor that includes “the activity of building web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces.” The autonomists showed how capitalism increasingly depends on capturing value produced outside of direct productive processes. Terranova interprets the rise of free labor as supporting this argument about “another logic of value.” Free labor is the product of a “compromise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire for creative production [see Boltanski & Chiapello] . . . and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the main source of added value.” For example, when thousands volunteered to host chat rooms for America On Line for free, “they were acting out a desire for affective and cultural production which was none the less real just because it was socially shaped.” But they showed how, in the post-Fordist economy, “knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.” Building on the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, Terranova argues that “immaterial labor” is a more general, less class-specific, category than “knowledge work”: “immaterial labour is a virtuality (an undetermined capacity) which belongs to the postindustrial productive subjectivity as a whole.” “The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labour and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity,” but “Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these virtualities and the processes of valorization.” She points out that popular accounts of networked collective intelligence strongly resemble the autonomist’s analysis of general intellect, but the former fail to relate their concept to capital, which is “the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes.” One reason capital has increasingly turned to free labor is the perhaps unique nature of digital commodities. Terranova claims that electronic, networked, or digital commodities often require more labor than more traditional industrial commodities, despite their apparent lack of materiality. She claims that “continuous, creative, innovative labour” is required to maintain the market value of commodities in the digital economy. For example, “a successful web site” requires constant updates and improvements in order to continue to attract users. “As a consequence, the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labour . . . only some of which was hyper-compensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism. Of the incredible amount of labour which sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list traffic to web sites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still ‘free labour.’” Terranova’s next chapter addresses recent work in biological computing, which includes artificial life, neural networks, and cellular automata. She claims the accomplishments of biological computing offer a “glimpse of the emergence of a kind of abstract machine of soft control – a diagram of power that takes as its operational field the productive capacities of the hyperconnected many.” For example, experiments with cellular automata attempt to create a set of initial conditions and filters that will allow useful emergent phenomena to appear and be captured. Control exists both at the beginning of the process in the selection of initial conditions and restrictions and at the end in the sorting and filtering of desired outcomes and variations. This soft control does not function by predetermining and/or completely controlling every step of the process but rather by latching on to the creative, productive power of emergent phenomena. Soft control builds on the “discovery of the immense productivity of a multitude, its absolute capacity to deterritorialize itself and mutate.” That is, “What we seem to have then is the definition of a new biopolitical plane that can be organized through the deployment of an immanent control, which operates directly within the productive power of the multitude and the clinamen.” Terranova concludes that this work in biological computing provides innovative ways to think about and create new forms of bottom-up organizing, but it also shows that self-organization is not a utopia of freedom but rather susceptible to insidious forms of control. Terranova’s final chapter discusses communication biopower. She claims, “these first years of the twenty-first century have consistently displaced the familiar opposition of the political spectrum . . . between left and right. What has displaced them, however, is neither the fetish of difference (as in post-1960s social movements) nor that of public opinion as a new superpower, but a more general compossibility of relations within a fluid and yet segmented bio-informational milieu.” A network politics needs to “synthesize not so much a common position (from which to win the masses over), but a common passion giving rise to a distributed movement able to displace the limits and terms within which the political constitution of the future is played out. . . . this political mode cannot but start with affects – that is with intensities, variations of bodily powers that are expressed as fear and empathy, revulsion and attraction, sadness and joy.”