The Spectral Revolution
What aggressive Orcas and the demise of a sub's occupants have in common
…what liberatory politics amount to [now is] a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.
deBoer reaches a conclusion here mirroring one I made over three years ago:
When certain socialist- and communist-identifying leftists post and share the image-meme of the guillotine online — often after an exposé on the corrupt activities of businesspersons or politicians —, it is meant to be a prompt for outrage, a call for class solidarity, and a reckoning of an eventuality. In actuality it is nothing more and nothing less than a wilted admittance of powerlessness, and further entrenches the idea of real political revolution in a realm of abstract gestures and revenge fantasies. Like wearing a shirt that has “Smash the patriarchy” written on it, or spray-painting “EAT THE RICH” on a bridge, it is a sort of stock imagistic slogan which loops back into itself and gives one the illusion that Someone Else is on the case of overthrowing the oppressors.
When deBoer writes that it is “easier to imagine whales delivering our salvation than it is to imagine us delivering it to ourselves”, my mind goes both to the oft-repeated and vaguely attributed claim that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; and to the Discourse-enveloped matter of the Titan submersible’s implosion and the deaths of its occupants. Immediately, this event has been interpreted in the same sense of the legal indictment of a corporate figurehead, with guillotine emoji reflexively deployed via ten-thousand Twitter posts.
In one regard, this response is an extension of what Kathryn Schulz has obviously but accurately observed about the apparent appeal of heists: “[Per] the logic of the heist, it’s appropriate to steal from the rich because they are rich.” Thus, per the logic which indicts very nearly any millionaire and any billionaire as having certainly profited from gross exploitation, the callousness of any response to such persons’ misfortunes is justified because it can never approximate the injustices perpetrated by said persons. This logic functions practically as a moral imperative; and if you or I find these celebrations to be indicative of some level of derangement, we are engaging in a sort of Center-left whataboutism possibly much worse than Right-wing extremism. For, as has been culturally demonstrated, the proper Leftist despises anything resembling a Centrist perspective far more than the conspiracy theorist who has “We the People” bumper-stickered on his car (and the main target for this vile, subliminal Centrism appears to be the white, “conventionally” attractive, heterosexual woman).
In another regard, this reaction illustrates how much of what passes for radical politics today, among both Left- and Right-identifying domains, is really the passive consumption of an event which one has had little or nothing to do with, but which can be appropriated according to the most emotionally agitating form of the dialectic.
Thus, just as news of the Titan’s implosion was shared across various news outlets, lesser coverage of the also-recent capsizing of a boat full of migrating persons was taken to be evidence of White Supremacy, to the extent that the New York Times issued a sort of critically distanced pseudo-apology the other day. It is certainly true that forcing a story into people’s faces nonstop can create a general interest which may have been absent without such relentless coverage. But what such an assessment misses is the ambience, or romance, of a given story. Far more important than the wealth or ethnicity of the submersible’s occupants in engaging public attention was the purpose of the voyage and its conclusion’s resonance with the tragic end of the very object of the persons’ destination. Just as Dan-el Padilla Peralta intends to combat eurocentrism in the literature of higher education in a strictly rationalist way, a strictly political view of any event is bound to miss its mythological dimensions, and consequently really the most potent sources of attention.
Presumably, according to the strictly political and rationalist doctrine of analysis here, the reason for the vast disparity of sustained public interest between Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 would have something to do about the identity of either’s passengers, some broader political-ethnic dimension, or, given the small span of time between either event, some perverse manifestation of the law of diminished returns. Of course, any of these assessments, put forward as total explanations, would be wrong, and almost comically so. As uncomfortable as it might be to admit, Flight 370’s “appeal” mainly and powerfully lies in the indeterminate nature of what caused the crash. It is mysterious. It is horrible, yes — and romantic!
But this is to stray from the general point.
A handful of billionaires dying does little to affect the reality of an overt, global, and deeply complex situation. The wealth, socioeconomic structures, disparities, power and familial relations, privatizations — all of these factors still exist, hardly deterred. And these are the factors which materially matter. But in one's fantasy world built up of passive consumption, a few billionaires dying is a thing to be pettily, misanthropically celebrated. Billionaires are Evil, the World is Going to End Soon Anyway, and You are Tired of Your Meat-Body. We are dealing here with a profoundly depressed psychology which is primed to regard any of these observations with the utmost hostile resistance, since imaginary victories are really all it has left to depend upon. And the fact that these celebrations are communicated through jokes lends credence to deBoer’s point: that “liberatory politics” have largely become the equivalent of “a shared bit of gallows humor” to be protected with a dead-seriousness when the “chronically Online” pathologies it typifies are highlighted.
Most of what our culture wars currently consist of is an ostensible representative of a certain demographic occupying a position and being met with an apparently inverted response by a representative of an anti-demographic. The whole thing with the Orca whales is patently and annoyingly stupid; but because, as one Twitter user in deBoer’s article righteously writes, “the majority shareholder of the Atlantic is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs [who] owns a $138 million super yacht”, one is obliged, on principle, to approach Jacob Stern’s article as a sort of coded, top-down enforcement of class warfare which must be pushed against with that strange, criticism-deflecting attitudinal combination of “lmao im just joking” and “get fucked, capitalist scum.”
Any conceptualizations of a class-conscious, actionable revolution here become unfeasible in a way similar to why the idea of utopia — a word which, as I’ve noted before, literally means “no-place” — depends upon a permanent imminence, an eternal just-over-the-horizon quality. Seemingly the main civil development of the past eight or so years is a wider, yet also more particular, index of which people and which groups to hate, mock, and rile up. It is far too fun and easy to chatter in our servers every day about why this videogame is racist, or that animal is non-binary, or how an article of clothing is misogynistic, and to believe all of this to be in service of a mounting tidal wave which will eventually and unstoppably threaten establishment hegemony. But just as more information does not by necessity lead to more clarity — as proponents of Big Data believe — more and more Discourse does not by necessity lead to a more probable revolution. If anything, it appears to have led to ever-more ineffective anger and despair and an intensifying impracticality of ideas.
As deBoer writes,
Explicitly identity-based political groups and movements remain neutered by their own constant infighting, lack of coherent demands, and perpetual allergy to coalition-building. BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality. What’s left of the women’s liberation movement wanders around defanged, as its members constantly accuse each other of practicing “white feminism” and appear totally uninterested in the concept of liberation for women as such. American movement conservatism stumbles along, having abandoned its philosophical lodestar of evangelical Christianity, in thrall to a deranged and serially-corrupt idiot who has recently been indicted on major charges. And yet its progressive counterpart has little in the way of clear objectives to take advantage of the moment, still playing defense.
We are engaged in little but a protracted game of feeble name-calling. But to call this a game is probably to honor our self-inflicted and, sadly, often self-hating situation with more of a point and possible state of resolution than it really possesses.