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first, i find it a bit dispiriting to see my alias characterized as predictable in the opening post...kinda makes me wonder if there is any point to actually posting this, of if folk imagine that they can deduce it.....
what i see from many of the posts above is an assumption that politics is a matter for large-scale organizations which are in positions to afford sustained access to mass media.
the stuff of politics amounts to the generation and manipulation of signifiers in spaces that reduce meaningful interaction to spectatorship.
so politics is a variant of television programming for the most part.....programming made up of organizational discourses about themselves, most of which use curious promouns in order to hoodwink viewers into thinking that the choices being discussed actually involve them....
political commitment/action, then, is a type of shopping--one browses the racks of prefabricated opinions looking for those that flatter most.
debate would then be a way of trying on one's new clothes, walking around, working out a persona that seems implied by new accessories.
so a "liberal" who for whatever perverse reason found that a rightwing "opinion" on an issue made his or her butt look smaller who decides to debate in a space like this is like someone tottering about in heels who is not used to them. you could easily reverse these positions and keep the equation intact.
underpinning all this is the assumption that actual people have no power whatsoever---more than that---people not only have no power, but they do not want it---further, it really does not matter what you think or how you come to think it because all subjective issues that might arise while you are shopping disappear behind the commodities you choose as you shop.
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if you really think this way, that politics is a particular space of consumer activity, then there is no point in debate at all.
why bother, frankly, when other types of consumer choice--such as drinking or drug abuse, will probably be more functional in therapeutic terms.
the outcomes--embarrassment and hangover, say, are perhaps even better than the kind of frustration engendered by political discussion because they at least do not come with the illusion that your participation in public life means anything and so while you may feel like hell, at least you dont also feel as though something basic has been taken from you.
besides, dignity is expendable--it dissolves quickly and efficiently in beer.
if you trade it away early and often enough, you will learn not even to miss it.
if you do not miss your dignity, then the dissolution of politics is easy to bear.
you wont miss that either.
maybe it is this type of facile cynicism that explains the otherwise incomprehensible attachment folk in netboards tend to espouse with libertarian positions---in a space where politics is nothing but shopping, the focus is the isolated individual. since politics is reduced to choosing between ill-fitting, mass produced options, questions of power, of social organization and its implications, of mode of production, etc., do not need come up. all that matters is you, the isolated, powerless, in communicado individual----somone who in all probability wants little more than to be left in his or her isolated, powerless silence and not be bothered with these repeated televised entreaties to be concerned about other people and the extent to which social organization is implicated in social problems. it makes sense, in that this political position, which is in fact not political at all, corresponds directly to the idea that you are nothing but a spectator who watches your own life amongst other programming choices on some flat and flattening screen.
and why not?
another way around: political discussion only matters to the degree that you imagine something is at stake in them.
if your starting assumptions work against this idea, the consequences unfold pretty directly.
this type of discussion can function as a kind of sociological theater across which you get to see how folk work out coping mechanisms that enable them to deal with their own (total and seemingly irreversible) powerlessness. this approach has a certain charm, but one can also find oneself growing unaccountably snippy when you actually post. but perhaps this indicates a certain luddite character i have--once i get my head around my own total powerlessness, perhaps i will be able to join in conversations about politics in a manner not so concerned with questions of implications that follow from arguments--because there arent any--and will simply take this for what it is--a particular conversational choice that i can indulge or not based on my consumer preferences of the moment. that'd be better. i look forward to achieving this stage of englightenment.
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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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