Is Paris Yearning (Part 4)

Authenticity and Discipline

In Part 1 I laid out my two aims with this series— 1) resume the debate between Anderson and Berman about the definition of modernity and in so doing 2) move their speculation in the 1980s around what “a genuine socialist culture” in the 21st century would look like, into the present. In Part 2 I began that project by reviewing Berman’s work on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris and how the physical changes of the city enabled and framed a very different kind of person: a modern, urban bourgeoises who could craft a new life out of consumptive habits, voluntary associations, and chosen professions. Most recently, in part 3, I described Paris Hilton as a modern-day Uzbek can help us update the Berman-esque mondernist subject and, in so doing, guide us toward a revolutionary subject. One that finds actualization and validation from within. -db

ON AUTHENTICITY AND DISCIPLINE

The pressures of modernism (using Berman’s definition) remain as strong as ever and yet we are no closer to a twenty-first century socialism than we were in the 80s when Anderson and Berman debated the subject. Quite the opposite in fact: the locus of validation remains outside and other from the self and everyday life. So far that is all I have done: revisit the problem, describe it in detail, and show that it is still there. Now the task is to speculate on a way out. In the same spirit of Camus’ invective that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”, we must imagine Paris Hilton happy if we are to make sense of the maelstrom of modernity--- to not fall when all that is solid melts into air. I do not mean here that we need to bring happiness to Paris Hilton the actually existing person (or brand). Rather, the issue at hand is whether we can find love, fulfillment, or even simple acceptance in the present which also builds toward a better future. When we are in between the endless photoshoots of social media inflected life where and how do we find the kind of liberatory joy that gets us closer to the communist horizon?¹

Mark Fisher’s plan was to ensure that increasingly regular tragedies—school shootings, plagues, financial catastrophes—were connected to their root cause: capital. To do this, “We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against Capital which presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous.”² Avoiding the issue of precorporation would be accomplished “by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy.”³ If daily life feels boring and tedious the solution isn’t more vapid escapism options, it is offering the one thing neoliberalism cannot provide: the option of less work. We take on each other’s burdens, support one-another, and build life rafts out of comradeship, not broadband and pills.

Jodi Dean’s Comrade is instructive here. The neoliberal individuation (an important aspect of capitalist realism), Dean argues, leaves us as little more than survivors who cling to their trauma “as if struggles were possessions”⁴ because it is what we have on hand to make an identity amidst systems of incalculable power. The dual figures of “survivor” and “the system,” she argues, make class struggle “unintelligible.”⁵ It does this by replacing political ideas with an actuarial calculus of individual actions, privileges, oppressions, and identities. Another figure essential to Dean’s analysis of neoliberal individuated politics is “the ally” who is always encouraged to engage in “confrontation not with state or capitalist power but with one’s own discomfort.”⁶

Without much effort, one can imagine the figures in Baudelaire’s Spleen #26 (See part 2) getting into an argument about allyship and privilege. Where the man/narrator demands his date interrogate her privilege as he takes up the coveted mantle of male feminist ally. The woman would be expected to see within herself the problem and solution to the hungry family. She should buy them some food, donate to a charity, or boycott Paris boulevard cafés until some unspecified action is taken to relieve her of the guilt of consumption. Indeed, This is Paris sets up Paris Hilton as a survivor figure and in the process convinces the audience that even someone with wealth and power, can still be a survivor of an unjust system. We are invited to empathize with her—and indeed her life does appear unenviable—but it is precisely this possibility of empathy that proves Dean’s point: that “survival itself appears as the real political achievement”⁷ and that even if “someone identifies as a woman, as black, as transgender, or as a survivor tells us nothing about their politics.”⁸

Berman’s take on the Usbek/Paris figure is that they are just as unfree as the person at the bottom of the social hierarchy and to a degree this is true: capitalism’s dialectical nature requires that both capitalist and worker be locked into a mutually reinforcing and destructive relationship that ultimately undermines itself through the resolution of its contradictions. But does a focus on the powerful as survivors or victims provide us with a useful political program? Does it inspire action or is it stultifying?

Dean posits the comrade as the appropriate supplanting figure to the survivor of neoliberal politics. The comrade contains four primary characteristics: discipline, joy, enthusiasm, and courage. All are equally important, but the issue of discipline is most germane to our project. As the obverse on the same coin as joy, discipline “expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of necessity.”⁹ It is how “inchoate and individual longing becomes collective will. Discipline also provides the impediment that maintains desire: organizing requires planning and postponement.”¹⁰ Crucially, the underlying aspect of discipline is mutual understanding and here she quotes Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: “discipline depends on political consciousness—on an understanding of why order must be obeyed.”

Why is discipline, as described by Dean, the appropriate response to Berman’s modernism? Or, put in the reverse, why do we need modernist comrades? The answer lies within the contemporary experience of the American leftist. In my own experiences in movement building and organizing, discipline is hard to come by. Not just because of the usual “everyone is busy” but because joining itself, without subsequent participation, is itself desirable. What a person does to earn a living, the band they play in, the reading group they lead, and the political organization they associate with come together to form their identity because, in part, they provide venues for socialization and therefore recognition. Rather than act as linkage points to part of something bigger than themselves, the organization they join but barely participate in serves as a building block for their superego—checking to see if they are who they say they are by signaling that they know that “doing the work” is important even if it doesn’t amount to anything. In fact, better that it amounts to nothing because failure is followed by respite and the dissolution of responsibilities to the group. If no power is gained, then there is no need to devote more time and energy to the project.

Let’s call this effect autocorporation, an evolution of the precorporation theorized by Fisher. Precorporation is “the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.”¹¹ It is at the heart of capitalist realism, the name he gives to the adaptation of capitalist cultural logic after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent seeming vanishing of cultures and societies outside of capitalism that could be incorporated into an ever-growing marketplace. The modern went from a tool for confronting capitalism, according to Fisher, to an essential part of the system: “modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.”¹² For Berman, remember, modernism encompasses all the artistic, political, and intellectual attempts at making sense of a rapidly modernizing world. Anderson meanwhile pronounced modernism’s death as just after the second world war. Fisher then, sits about two thirds in the middle, closer to Anderson than Berman, in his analysis and I think that’s just the right place to land: modernism comes back to us as a zombie. Not gone completely, but not quite alive.

Fisher’s first example of precorporation is Nirvana: “nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.”¹³ Precorporation is at the heart of Generation X’s angst around “selling out” and being incapable of reaching escape velocity from the black hole of corporate media. But for the generations that grew up on social media, attention and virality was always alluring if not an explicit goal of creation. Rather than fear the precorporation inherent in selling out, autocorporation lets us fear that we may fail to cash in on our identity projects. That the investment you made in your identity will lose or never attain some sort of cache in the larger cultural arena. The through line from Enlightenment modernism to autocorporation –from the Parisian Cafés to the Little Hiltons at the rope line-- is the act of being seen and authenticated by an imagined audience. What changes is the content and actions that achieve this goal. The new gives way to the pastiche, which now gives way to autocorporation’s incessant demand for riffing: slight alterations, customizations, and direct responses to another idea that is itself a pastiche of something old.

Consider, for example, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Often left unsaid until the liquor-soaked decompression sessions after chapter meetings, DSA is a paper tiger: only about ten percent of “members” are active in the organization. The vast majority are names on a spreadsheet willing to have dues deducted from their bank account in support of an ostensibly progressive grassroots organization. In this way, for these paper members, DSA serves as a subscription to a piece of their identity as a left-of-Democrat person with Good Opinions. Regardless of individuals’ reasons for not participating the point is that they do not, yet they keep paying dues, and quite often ignore repeated requests to get more involved. Crucially, those active members have no way to get those people involved or expel them for lack of work. They can only continue to take their money, but it never ends up being enough to do much with.

DSA serves two autocorporating functions: First it is a brand name for socialist activism. Few members could describe the genesis of the organization and its position in the constellation of socialist organizations. Someone becomes a member of DSA because it is an empty signifier of contemporary socialist movement building that can be filled by the local riffing of any given chapter’s organizing committee. The DSA’s consistent refusal of what it calls “democratic centralism” –a holdover of anti-communist agitation amidst American leftism- has led to individual chapters to riff on the aesthetics and core tenets of the organization. This can be powerful, letting organizers on the ground mold their chapter to the issues and iconography of their jurisdiction, but (intentionally or otherwise) it also means that being a DSA member asks very little of the individual.

The DSA problem, ultimately, comes down to discipline. Discipline of people to rely on each other to get things done. Not just teamwork or logistics but sense of purpose driven by an underlying ideology. The result is programs whose ability to draw attention and even money far exceeds their ability to get humans to act in concert on a single project. This is the primary symptom of a political landscape dominated by autocorporation. Our orientations, ideologies, and affiliations, are designed —willfully or not— to be pieces of an identity project first and a means to a material end a distant second. This is how so-called Black Lives Matter activists can buy mansions for the express purpose of content creation¹⁴ while the supposed core mission of police abolition and racial justice continues to flag.

To agree with Dean’s importance of discipline is to also implicitly agree with Anderson in both the definition of modernism and the path toward a twenty-first century socialism. Berman’s love of the infinitely creative human, if it were to ever be a successful political project, would be too easily autocorporated into the “Creative Economy.” Speaking of creatives, when we look back at Dunayevskaya’s criticism of the movements behind Nasser and Mao does she not sound a bit like Richard Florida? Who else but Florida has convinced millions to adopt a political project based almost completely on bromides about “the creative untapped energies” of the masses? Whether Creative Class theses are just Marxist humanism autocorporated or Marxist humanism was never capable of undergirding a political program is almost besides the point: today we suffer from a lack of good ideas about a positive program of socialist struggle.

It is now finally time to answer that last thorny question: What does a twenty-first century socialism look like? It would have to cut through the cynicism and irony that many people (not just leftists) have built up as a defense against the relentless cavalcade of horrific news and distracting entertainment. But that’s only the tip of the spear, as it were, and there is so much more to consider in thinking of a hegemonic socialist realism. There are many facets to such a topic but I only feel capable of describing it in terms of authenticity and discipline.

Authenticity is always an attempt to reconcile with what Hegel called the “freedom of the void”: that hollowed-out piece of us that the Enlightenment intelligencia said could be filled with anything. Rather than seek to describe a new peg to fit in that hole it would make sense to imagine the kind of person that does not feel this fundamental lack. Such a complete person may think fairly little about their identity as something that needs constructing or maintenance. It may just simply “be.” In which case we could consider the discipline of the comrade as a successful replacement for authenticity. I say “replacement” reluctantly since a person’s sense of self and consciousness is not so simple, so maybe here is a better way of saying it: the discipline engendered by comradely relationships obviates the will to be authentic. If you are accepted among a group such that you would both subsume your own interest for the group and the group is dedicated to your joy and flourishing, then no one would bother to seek out the trappings of authenticity. Authenticity is nothing more than thin gruel in comparison to the hearty meal of comradeship.

The project now is to work against the invectives of our contemporary moment to be predictably unique in comparison to others. To constantly riff and remix the old and instead begin to feel a comfort in each other. A deep and earnest commitment to bettering each other’s lives. We can kill the Little Hiltons in all of us and regain our own collective identities as comrades in not just struggle but flourishing. What does a twenty-first century socialism look like? It looks a disciplined dedication to changing the world until you and your comrades fit comfortably in it. One immediate side-effect of this might actually be a widespread ambivalence to moving to bigger cities among the young. Even Richard Florida has come around to the fact that the creative class thesis he promulgated has done little else than supercharge disparity between cities as entertainment and culture becomes the main pull of the bourgeoisie. Perhaps instead we might be satisfied with staying put and building something worth holding onto. I’m reminded of the lyrics to “Lady Liberty” by Andrew Jackson Jihad:

When our government acts like this

I don't wanna live here anymore

Sure, I could be a pussy and move to Portland or New York

Or I could stay and change the place where I was born

1. “The horizon is Real in teh sense of impossible —we can never reach it— and in the sense of actual (Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real includes both these senses). The horizon shapes our setting. We can lose our bearings, but the horizon is a necessary dimension of our actuality. Whether the effect of a singularity or the meeting of earth and sky, the horizon is the fundamental division establishing where we are.

With respect to politics, the horizon that conditions our experience is communism.” (P. 2) Dean, J. (2012). The Communist Horizon.

2. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 77.

3. Fisher, 79

4. Dean, Comrade, 18.

5. Dean, 13.

6. Dean, 18.

7. Dean, 16.

8. ibid.

9. Dean, 8.

10. Dean, 85.

11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 9.

12. Fisher, 8.

13. Fisher, 9

14. https://blacklivesmatter.com/we-want-to-talk-to-you-about-the-creators-house-in-california/