A.R.: Well I wouldn't say it's everything but I think that's certainly a significant element of it. I think that's how, I mean I've been struck by what seems to me to be the increasingly rapid circulation of the movement from one enthusiasm to another without ever reflecting on the characteristics and the outcome of the previous enthusiasm. Right?
As well as it seems to be an inability to recognize the patterned nature of the kabuki theater of our political display in the sense that, well you can't notice that it's kabuki because you don't notice that it's a tale type, or a performance type that gets reproduced in different settings over and over. That's what a friend of mine calls the pageantry of protest. And I know one thing that I and I've not been alone about this have noticed for a number of years it's like, among progressives, among activists, what seems to be like the separation of action from performance of an action to assessment of its impact.
And some of that I've described as appearing as a reduction of politics or political action to a form of bearing witness but there's no real, accretive sense, or sense of political activism as a project that should be accretive, that the base of supporters and maybe the participants grows over time. And if it doesn't grow over time, if you're on the political margins, then it's appropriate to ask if what were you doing was worth it, but these questions don't ever come up and all that seems to be consistent with this construct of Present Shock, or it does to me. I wonder if that makes sense to you, too.
R.K.: I think it makes a lot of sense. Activists and the whole progressive conversation, where does it take us? Now it makes me think of Occupy which I think did make a difference and did bring in people and change the conversation.
A.R.: Well, I maybe a little more jaundiced about it. I think it's kind of like the WTO demonstrations. And I had talks with friends and colleagues over... in fact a number of them that went the same way over the span of a few weeks. We're talking about Occupy and I expressed my skepticism about it and the response I got was well but at least it has people talking about inequality and my response to that was well it has who talking about inequality?
You talked about it before, I talked about it before. Your friends and people you associate with talked about it before. So it doesn't have us talking about it when we weren't talking about it before. And then what the conversation would get around to was that, well, it was discussed in the New York Times or the Washington Post or whatever. I'd say yeah that's true but the Times and the Post also talked about Kim Kardashian's wedding. So you know.
R.K.: Yeah.
A.R.: And it's gone. Like it fizzled and to be honest, I mean, I'm really not a conspiracy theory type though of course when people say that then it's almost an acknowledgment that they are but they don't want to be considered one, but I'm really not.
But I was intrigued to see the months in the run up to Occupy all of the exuberant coverage that the mainstream media were giving the so-called Arab Spring and what intrigued me about that was, well, the interpretive trope, that the people, which is already a problematic abstraction, just went into the streets and had these demonstrations and they toppled the government. So this is like an adolescent oriented understanding, movie of an understanding of how revolutions happen.
And that was curious, why, what this was all about. Why the hyperbolic constant coverage of it was going on and then I realized that most immediately it's got to do with the logic of the corporate news industry. There are arresting images, I mean attractive women on the barricades, things burning and blowing up and tanks and people chanting so there's that appeal. And it's also the case that the reporters don't have any understanding of politics themselves so there's that.
But it struck me though that this was also perpetrating a counter-productively naïve understanding about how political change is made. And then the next thing you know, there's Occupy. Now, I'm not saying that the CIA, or CNN, created Occupy but I have seen recently, when I get off the phone I can email these to you if you're interested if you haven't seen them, a couple of articles on Adbusters, one of which was in Jacobin, which I think is a very important left publication that actually came together after Occupy, but a couple of interesting articles on Adbusters which was the source of Occupy Wall Street. And there was no left politics that was involved in that. It was all about expression and a bizarre notion that you can create appeals to a kind of... I think a sort of Facebook farm or Dungeons and Dragons understanding of anarchism, that you can create the new society just by staking out its space on a public park and enacting it and making up the rules as you go along.
It just struck me a little more like Children of the Corn than anything else, to be honest, but that said, there were people who were involved in it and it did draw that general motion drew some young people who would have the potential to go on from there to develop a serious politics and so now I can appreciate that secondary aspect of the Occupy thing. But as to how effective or to how much that has been the case it's too soon to tell. I go back to the WTO moment and the Seattle demo. For one thing, I mean nobody in their wildest minds expected that the anti-WTO demos would be as successful and effective as they were. But the problem was that there wasn't really a clear sense of where to go next and it's because the action, the politics was all in the action and then that just led to, that authorized an imperative to go get another action. And the problem is" Todd Gitlin did a really interesting book in 1980 called, The Whole World is Watching; The Mass Media in the Making and the Unmaking of the New Left, and he talks in the book about the logic, how the movements logic of activism converge on a mass medias logic of newsworthiness and the result was an internalization of a pressure within the movement.
This is both SDS and the black power to Black Panthers, but to make each demo an action more dramatic than the previous one; it had to be bigger. And when it couldn't get bigger, they had to do something, they had to do something different about them. They had to be violent. Smashing car windows, five thousand people had to get arrested, to remain consistent with the logic of the newsworthiness and I think there's something like that was at work in the Occupy stuff also but again, like I will say, that, yeah, I will freely grant that the moment struck a chord with some people especially, young people out in the society, but beyond that, who knows.
R.K.: So, let me take a step back. You said that the anti-WTO demos were more effective than they were expected to be. How were they effective?
A.R.: Well, they kind of shut down the city of Seattle and they made it very difficult for the delegates to meet and they definitely put the issue on the table. Now, I think this is another parallel because the way that they put the issue on the table, put the issue of globalization, which was the buzzword at the time, on the table seemed to be meaningful.
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