Not An Alternative

Stephen Duncombe’s new book - Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy

Stephen Duncombe’s new book, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, will be out in early January. Something to check out for sure. While we haven’t read it yet all signs point to it being excellent. Stephen has a long history as an activist and is well respected within activist circles. At the same time is he one of the few who, while maintaining the connection to, for lack of better word, “people on the ground”, he also has a clear connection to the ideas expressed by some of today’s most radical thinkers and theorists.

Slavoj Zizek “Two opposite conclusions can be drawn from the fact that enjoyment is a polical factor in late capitalism, that it’s politics are politics of fantasies: either a purist withdrawl into desiccated rationality of what Stephen Duncombe proposes, beating the enemy at its own terrain and thereby opening up a new field for radical politics. The book is simply the sine qua non for any renewal of Leftist politics - a must for anyone who wants the Left to overcome its purist shame!”

Michael Hardt “Imagination is central to all successful political projects and yet the mainstream Left allowed its imaginative faculty to atrophy in recent years. Duncombe shows how the methods of some of today’s most creative social movements can teach the Left how to dream again and, by exercising its imagination, to create a winning progressive politics.”

We have high hopes that Stephen’s work will serve as a catalyst giving rise to the emergence of a age where radical theorists and activists work together and that this book will mark a decisive break in history where the Left takes a new form.

Here’s an except:

“In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U. S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles it was well-written, well-researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon to be (in)famous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president. The exchange went like this:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in an oversized, multicolored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.

What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much liberal and left animosity and felt something else: excited, inspired….and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.

How could my reaction be so different from so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there is something about progressive politics that has become increasingly problematic.

The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The ideological inheritors of the May ’68 protest slogan of “Take your desires for reality” were now counseling its reversal: take reality for your desires. The left and right had switched roles: the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

Dreams often make those left-of-center nervous. Fantasy and spectacle have been the property of Fascism, totalitarian Communism, and, more recently, the unspeakable horror known as Entertainment Tonight. Traditionally we are more comfortable with those things mumbled by the Times reporter underneath his breath: “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.”

It’s not surprising that progressives feel an affinity for the Enlightenment and empiricism. It was empiricism that broke the Church’s grip on the interpretation of the world. By challenging the Church on its explanations of the physical world, the empiricists opened up an assault on its political and spiritual power as well. Likewise, the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, reasoning creature undermined the hierarchies of feudalism and the foundations of divine right. Traditional “common sense” held that common people could not govern themselves nor act orderly in the marketplace. Contesting these assumptions cleared the way for new forms of politics and economics. The religious festivals and entertaining spectacles mobilized by church and crown to excite or divert the masses and cement religious or royal power could now be replaced by town meetings and coffee houses where enlightened citizens debated the issues of the day. These reasonable citizens, understanding reality as it is and not as it is imagined, would guide democracy and rationalize the market, breaking forever with a reactionary past cloaked in magic, mystery, and manipulation. In other words, and more to the point, progressives throughout history embraced the Enlightenment and empiricism because historically these ideas were progressive.

But all this is history. Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of the past, or rather, past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images, political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news. More and more of the economy is devoted to marketing and entertainment or the performance of scripted roles in the service sector. We live in a “society of the spectacle,” as the French theorist provocateur Guy Debord declared back in 1967. Yet, faced with this new world progressives are still acting out a script inherited from the past. This is a mistake, for those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empiricism today are doomed to political insignificance. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belongs to those who tell the better story.

Walter Lippmann, the influential writer, popular newspaper editor and informal political adviser to nearly every president from Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, argued that democratic theory has little to do with democratic practice. Democratic theory resides in the coffee houses and government buildings where enlightened men hold reasoned conversations, examine evidence, and arrive at rational decisions. Theoretical democracy is a heady process. Its practice aims a bit lower. To win elections among a large and diverse population and get the majority to agree upon policy or go along with decisions, politicians, like their commercial counterparts in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, speak to people’s fantasies and desires through a language of images and associations. By manipulating symbols, exploiting memories, and spinning stories the political elite are able to guide the direction of public opinion. “The practice of democracy has turned a corner,” Lippmann argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.” He called this revolution the Manufacture of Consent.

Those of us opposed to rule by a political elite learned an important lesson from Lippmann. If democracy is to be sustained, and citizens are to truly govern their lives, then the manufacture of consent must be continuously revealed and deconstructed. Political stagecraft must be relentlessly attacked with our arsenal of facts and reason.
We learned the wrong lesson.

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form. A politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational. A politics that employs symbols and associations. A politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.”