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the extent to which presonal responsibility is an abstraction is directly correlated to the degree of political disempowerment experienced by individuals.
the dominant discourse in the states for 20 years has attempted to reduce politics to a kind of shopping. in the u.s., people are politically constituted as active subjects one day every 4 years. otherwise, they are expected to submit while pretending they are not, consume, be isolated, be powerless.
there are few (and increasingly fewer) meaningful feedback loops that connect the public to the states, fewer and fewer spaces of anything like a democratic practice.
you want to deal with personal responsibility matters? then increase the level of democratic practice---authoritarian regimes substitute repression for responsibility, they engender a kind of total indifference, a kind of wholesale withdrawal on the part the population. a more authoritarian style government will make every element of contemporary society that bothers you, art, expontentially worse.
this does not fall into the curious, constricting binaries that have emerged on the thread: authoritarian vs. "anarchist" (what anarchism? the black block?) or "libertarian" (a repellent pseudo-politics)--the alternatives are not total authority or total atomization. jamming the conversation into this space seems to me a way of trying to structure the outcome in advance.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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