Wallerstein and Co-optation

I guess my posts will probably oscillate between being narratively driven, i.e., me actually explaining things, and being a mad dash to write down whatever disparate things flow forth from my brain - my last post being definitively one of the latter type. I mean, maybe the last post is comprehensible if you’re also trying to work through the implications of complexity theory or already have, but if not, well, I’m not too worried I guess about the readability of the hasty ones, especially since their obfuscatory character will fade into the background in the long-run.

Anyway, since the end of last semester - my final semester - I’ve been reading a book of Immanuel Wallerstein’s entitled The Politics of the World Economy:

Wallerstein has formed, along with Chuck Dyke, Pierre Bourdieu and Alan Garfinkel the quadrumvirate that has informed my thinking about complexity and social systems. Of course, “my thinking” just means “the bits and pieces I’ve cobbled together from my elementary understanding of these guys’ works” and maybe in a decade or two I can use the phrase “my thinking” without eliciting a chorus of supercilious brows from my imaginary, and perhaps real, interlocutors. But, still, what I mean is that my current academic trajectory, whatever that is, is informed mostly by these four at the moment. It’s not bad company to keep.

Anyway, trying to go through all of the Wallerstein in one post would be way too much, and I don’t think I have the wherewithal to do that anyway. What I did want to talk about was something that I’ve been thinking about since I taught a class called Art and Society last year and which has been popping up more and more lately, finally in the Wallerstein, which made me think to write about it.

So, the class I taught last year, I did a fair amount on pranks and the situationists, having the students read some interviews from that first Re/Search issue on pranks and the Situationist Anthology (which is all online here anyway), basically in order to get them to start thinking about whether art actually has power - in a real sense - or if the games artists play are (politically) meaningless. I’m actually rather agnostic on the issue. The things I know about network theory and about complexity and about how the system - meaning in this case, the political system - actually undergoes change, part of me thinks that most of this is just playing around and there’s no actual repercussions. But at the same time, those that put weird stuff into the public sphere start to skew the norm, even if it’s ever so slightly and they create the conditions by which weird stuff that follows them seems less abrasive and is just strange, so if people continue doing these things, maybe reality will become odder and odder. It’s a longshot, but if you look at the ability for weird and silly humor to get into the public eye, 2007 harbors a much more hospitable atmosphere than many of the times past. I mean, Stella, Wonder Showzen, The Mighty Boosh (maybe that’s unfair, as Britain is much more open to this kind of stuff than the US), but the majority of Adult Swim, etc.

So, alright, maybe weird art and media can skew reality in a strange direction. Probably not because these things aren’t in a prominent place of power, but they can move things ever so slightly all the same. The real strange stuff and the stuff that is very politically motivated though usually has to sneak into public consciousness - through public pranks or smuggled in in a kids’ show as Wonder Showzen did. The problem though, and here we’re getting to what I want to talk about, is that the methods and strategies that have been employed in the past to smuggle in these kinds of things are being co-opted themselves by those in power, thus rendering them less potent. For example, the situationist method of detournement, by which public advertisements are changed to reveal a new message.

Banksy is a good contemporary example of this. Take his detourning of the Paris Hilton album: Well, this kind of strategy has been co-opted through things like viral marketing. In some cases, like when I was in New York last year and I saw chalk outlines on the ground advertising for The Wire, I can maybe get behind them, but in most cases, it’s rather disheartening.

So, one of the things Wallerstein talks about in “Revolutionary Movements in the Era of US Hegemony” - and before I go on I feel I must add a disclaimer. As much as I love this book, I am frankly baffled by Wallerstein’s desire to predict things. One of the first tenets of complexity theory is that there is deterministic unpredictability, i.e., patterns that exist but that don’t repeat and that the farther you get away from the initial conditions of a system, the more unpredictable it gets. There’re reasons in his favor, of course. Wallerstein isn’t explicitly using complexity theory, or at least doesn’t realize he’s using it. It’s both early in his career and early in complexity’s formulation (the book is from 1984), so some excuses may be made, but his insistence on trying to predict the course of world politics as capitalism does its thing in hindsight is a bit bizarre. So, he tries to predict what new political alignments will come into being as the US’s influence fades, hegemonic status moving over to Japan, various alliances are built anew, etc. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t see the end of the USSR which is coming somewhat quickly (from his POV), and therefore can’t see what really did happen. No one could.

So, in this essay, Wallerstein wants to be pro-revolution, or rather, he is pro-revolution (not necessarily violent, what I mean by “revolution” is the dissolution and transformation of the political system into something new - Aufhebung), and is looking at various reasons people have said as to why revolutions have failed in the past. See, Wallerstein believes (at least in this book, I’ve yet to read his later writings, so he may have changed his mind) that a socialist world-economy is possible, but revolutionary forces have to have a long, sustained commitment to social change and must be able to guide the transformation through the crisis-period of capitalism (think of it in Kuhnian terms). I’m rather skeptical that this is a possibility, but I won’t get into that now.

So, Wallerstein is evaluating the critique that the way capitalism works, revolutionary forces and ideas are eventually co-opted - commodified and neutered, rendered harmless because it’s now part of that which it opposed. A dialectical move, but not really the one we want. (”we”, of course, since I figure myself and whomever is really reading this is probably of the same political persuasion).

“In the 1960s an alternative explanation began to be offered. The coming to power of antisystemic movements, far from being their triumph, was a gigantic lure of global corporate liberalism, a mechanism to defang the movements, co-opt their elites, giving them the form but not the substance of victory. the truly dangerous face of America was not that of J.F. Dulles but that of J.F. Kennedy” (138).

I’m ultimately not interested in whether this is why revolutionary movements in the past have failed or not, but rather to point out the insidious nature of this as a by-product of capitalism, that is, it’s not a conspiracy theory or a conscious strategy of the right to get rid of antisystemic movements, but rather a consequence of the need for there to be ever-rising profits, and therefore, the need to colonize every sub-culture, including the ones that oppose capitalism philosophically. Because capitalism is the all-encompassing world-economy and the cost of not operating within its tendrils is high, if not outright dire, eventually everything will be commodified. In one sense, this may be ok, as it hastens the crisis into an outright world-revolution, but my skepticism about that being a good thing is rather high.

When capitalism collapses, the chances that something more benign will take its place is rather small. This isn’t to collapse into outright cynicism, but rather to note that perhaps instead of welcoming a revolution, we should rather delay this total collapse as long as possible.

But I digress. Between viral marketing co-opting detournement and corporate culture co-opting the message of populism (see Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God), I am finding it harder and harder to believe that there is a strategy that will do more than minorly inconvenience those in power, if do anything at all. I mean, opening dialogues with people is a start, and I’m all for surreptitious aesthetic methods that will make actually living life a stranger experience phenomenologically, but beyond the existentialist dedication to a leftist cause merely out of a sense of “this is the right thing to do even if it leads nowhere”, I’m at a loss.

“If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. ’cause that’s all there is.”

(and as much as Joss Whedon’s melodrama pales in comparison these days to things like Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, he really got that existential shit down in Angel)

Huh, I think I’ve made a point. Maybe.

Filed by andyb at September 2nd, 2007 under philosophy